A Deeply Supervised Attention Metric-Based Network and an Open Aerial Image Dataset for Remote Sensing Change Detection

Change detection (CD) aims to identify surface changes from bitemporal images. In recent years, deep learning (DL)-based methods have made substantial breakthroughs in the field of CD. However, CD results can be easily affected by external factors, including illumination, noise, and scale, which leads to pseudo-changes and noise in the detection map. To deal with these problems and achieve more accurate results, a deeply supervised (DS) attention metric-based network (DSAMNet) is proposed in this article. A metric module is employed in DSAMNet to learn change maps by means of deep metric learning, in which convolutional block attention modules (CBAM) are integrated to provide more discriminative features. As an auxiliary, a DS module is introduced to enhance the feature extractor’s learning ability and generate more useful features. Moreover, another challenge encountered by data-driven DL algorithms is posed by the limitations in change detection datasets (CDDs). Therefore, we create a CD dataset, Sun Yat-Sen University (SYSU)-CD, for bitemporal image CD, which contains a total of 20 000 aerial image pairs of size $256\times256$ . Experiments are conducted on both the CDD and the SYSU-CD dataset. Compared to other state-of-the-art methods, our network achieves the highest accuracy on both datasets, with an F1 of 93.69% on the CDD dataset and 78.18% on the SYSU-CD dataset.

I. Introduction

Change detection (CD) is the process of quantitatively analyzing surface changes between different phases in the same area [1]. This process is of great significance to many fields, including environmental investigation [2], geological disaster monitoring [3], land cover surveys, and urban planning [4], [5]. In recent decades, regular monitoring and analysis of changes in land cover has become increasingly crucial because of the deterioration of the ecological environment. Meanwhile, high-resolution multisource and multitemporal remote sensing images can be obtained over different areas, which have been proven to be a key source of primary data for change detection (CD) because of their wide coverage, high temporal resolution, and diverse data types [6].