A Siamese Network Based U-Net for Change Detection in High Resolution Remote Sensing Images

Remote sensing image change detection (RSICD) is a technique that explores the change of surface coverage in a certain time series by studying the difference between multiple remote sensing images (RSIs) collected over the same area. Traditional RSICD algorithms exhibit poor performance on complex change detection (CD) tasks. In recent years, deep learning (DL) techniques have achieved outstanding results in the fields of RSI segmentation and target recognition. In CD research, most of the methods treat multitemporal remote sensing data as one input and directly apply DL-based image segmentation theory on it while ignoring the spatio-temporal information in these images. In this article, a new siamese neural network is designed by combing an attention mechanism (Siamese_AUNet) with UNet to solve the problems of RSICD algorithms. SiameseNet encodes the feature extraction of RSIs by two branches in the siamese network, respectively. The weights are shared between these two branches in siamese networks. Subsequently, an attention mechanism is added to the model in order to improve its detection ability for changed objects. The models are then compared with conventional neural networks using three benchmark datasets. The results show that the Siamese_AUNet newly proposed in this article exhibits better performance than other standard methods when solving problems related to weak CD and noise suppression.

Automated summary

This article introduces a new algorithm for remote sensing image change detection, which combines attention mechanism with UNet and has performed well in solving complex change detection problems, especially in weak change detection and noise suppression.