Deep Learning-Based Detection of Urban Forest Cover Change along with Overall Urban Changes Using Very-High-Resolution Satellite Images

Abstract

Urban forests globally face severe degradation due to human activities and natural disasters, making deforestation an urgent environmental challenge. Remote sensing technology and very-high-resolution (VHR) bitemporal satellite imagery enable change detection (CD) for monitoring forest changes. However, deep learning techniques for forest CD concatenate bitemporal images into a single input, limiting the extraction of informative deep features from individual raw images. Furthermore, they are developed for middle to low-resolution images focused on specific forests such as the Amazon or a single element in the urban environment. Therefore, in this study, we propose deep learning-based urban forest CD along with overall changes in the urban environment by using VHR bitemporal images. Two networks are used independently: DeepLabv3+ for generating binary forest cover masks, and a deeply supervised image fusion network (DSIFN) for the generation of a binary change mask. The results are concatenated for semantic CD focusing on forest cover changes. To carry out the experiments, full scene tests were performed using the VHR bitemporal imagery of three urban cities acquired via three different satellites. The findings reveal significant changes in forest covers alongside urban environmental changes. Based on the accuracy assessment, the networks used in the proposed study achieved the highest F1-score, kappa, IoU, and accuracy values compared with those using other techniques. This study contributes to monitoring the impacts of climate change, rapid urbanization, and natural disasters on urban environments especially urban forests, as well as relations between changes in urban environment and urban forests.