Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 Data Fusion for Urban Change Detection Using a Dual Stream U-Net

Urbanization is progressing rapidly around the world. With sub-weekly revisits at global scale, Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and Sentinel-2 multispectral imager (MSI) data can play an important role for monitoring urban sprawl to support sustainable development. In this letter, we proposed an urban change detection (CD) approach featuring a new network architecture for the fusion of SAR and optical data. Specifically, a dual stream concept was introduced to process different data modalities separately, before combining extracted features at a later decision stage. The individual streams are based on U-Net architecture that is one of the most popular fully convolutional networks used for semantic segmentation. The effectiveness of the proposed approach was demonstrated using the Onera Satellite CD (OSCD) dataset. The proposed strategy outperformed other U-Net-based approaches in combination with unimodal data and multimodal data with feature level fusion. Furthermore, our approach achieved state-of-the-art performance on the urban CD problem posed by the OSCD dataset. Our Sentinel-1 SAR data and code are available on https://github.com/SebastianHafner/DS_UNet.

Automated summary

This letter introduces an approach for monitoring urban sprawl using Sentinel-1 SAR and Sentinel-2 MSI data. The proposed method utilizes a dual stream concept and U-Net architecture to process and extract features from different data modalities, which are then combined at the decision stage. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach in urban change detection.