Change Detection Based on Low-Level to High-Level Features Integration With Limited Samples

Detailed land cover change in multitemporal images is an important application for earth science. Many techniques have been proposed to solve this problem in different ways. However, accurately identifying changes still remains a challenge due to the difficulties in describing the characteristics of various change categories by using single-level features. In this article, a multilevel feature representation framework was designed to build robust feature set for complex change detection task. First, four different levels of information from low level to high level, including pixel-level, neighborhood-level, object-level, and scene-level features, were extracted. Through the operation of extracting different level features from multitemporal images, the differences between them can be described comprehensively. Second, multilevel features were fused to reduce the dimension and then used as the input for supervised change detector with initial limited labels. Finally, for reducing the labeling cost and improving the change detection results simultaneously, active learning was conducted to select the most informative samples for labeling, and this step together with the previous steps were iteratively conducted to improve the results in each round. Experimental results of three pairs of real remote sensing datasets demonstrated that the proposed framework outperformed the other state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy. Moreover, the influences of scene scale for high-level semantic features in the proposed approach on change detection performance were also analyzed and discussed.