Edge-Guided Hierarchical Network for Building Change Detection in Remote Sensing Images

Abstract

Building change detection monitors building changes by comparing and analyzing multi-temporal images acquired from the same area and plays an important role in land resource planning, smart city construction and natural disaster assessment. Different from change detection in conventional scenes, buildings in the building change detection task usually appear in a densely distributed state, which is easy to be occluded; at the same time, building change detection is easily interfered with by shadows generated by light and similar-colored features around the buildings, which makes the edges of the changed region challenging to be distinguished. Aiming at the above problems, this paper utilizes edge information to guide the neural network to learn edge features related to changes and suppress edge features unrelated to changes, so as to accurately extract building change information. First, an edge-extracted module is designed, which combines deep and shallow features to supplement the lack of feature information at different resolutions and to extract the edge structure of the changed features; second, an edge-guided module is designed to fuse the edge features with different levels of features and to guide the neural network to focus on the confusing building edge regions by increasing the edge weights to improve the network’s ability to detect the edges that have changed. The proposed building change detection algorithm has been validated on two publicly available data (WHU and LEVIR-CD building change detection datasets). The experimental results show that the proposed model achieves 91.14% and 89.76% in F1 scores, respectively, demonstrating superior performance compared to some recent learning change detection methods.