SAUNet3+CD: A Siamese-Attentive UNet3+ for Change Detection in Remote Sensing Images

With the development of various optical sensors, change detection is one of the most actively researched areas in remotely sensed imagery with high spatial resolution. In particular, deep learning-based change detection techniques are very important for use in various fields, such as land monitoring and disaster analysis, because they can show superior performance compared to traditional unsupervised and supervised change detection methods. This manuscript proposes a Siamese-attentive UNet3+ for change detection (SAUNet3+CD) of multitemporal imagery with high spatial resolution. The existing UNet3+ was modified to a Siamese-based architecture, and a spatial and channel attention module was added to detect various changed areas. The proposed model was trained to effectively detect building growth and decay through the data augmentation of open datasets and a hybrid loss function. In experiments using two open datasets, the proposed deep learning model effectively detected changed areas in multitemporal images better than various methods, such as existing Siamese-based networks and a network for semantic segmentation.