Research on the impact of change features for remote sensing image change detection

Abstract

As remote sensing technology continues to advance, the accuracy and quantity of remote sensing images have significantly improved. The generation of a vast amount of available data has facilitated the widespread application of various deep learning methods in the field of remote sensing data processing, such as object detection, semantic segmentation, and change detection. In the aforementioned tasks, Change detection is used to identify alterations occurring on the Earth's surface by utilizing remote sensing (RS) data. In recent years, deep learning based methods have exhibited significantly superior performance compared to traditional change detection techniques. The fundamental strategy enabling these advancements involves extracting appropriate deep learning features from input remote sensing images through various backbone networks such as VGG, ResNet, DenseNet etc . Nevertheless, the features extracted by the aforementioned backbone networks may not fully cater to the specific requirements of remote sensing image change detection tasks. Consequently, our goal is to explore the influence of features extracted by different backbone networks on change detection tasks and introduce a specialized backbone network tailored for change detection. This endeavor aims to produce features that are better suited for the of change detection. The experimental results indicate that our specifically designed feature extraction network for remote sensing image change detection outperforms traditional networks in extracting task-specific features. These features are better suited for subsequent decoder modules, enhancing the generation of image-based change detection results. At the same time, we found that when using general backbone networks for change detection, ResNet achieves the highest metric accuracy, while DenseNet has the lowest memory usage and the fastest training and testing speed. Depending on the specific task, we can choose the appropriate backbone network as needed.