A Comparison of Uncertainty Estimation Methods for Building Footprint Change Detection from Sentinel-2 Imagery

Abstract. This manuscript investigates the effects of uncertainty methods applied to the problem of deep learning-based semantic segmentation of building footprints on moderate-resolution satellite imagery. While the recent efforts of big corporations to add information about building locations and sizes on a global or continental scale are generally valuable, still the overall challenge persists in identifying the spatial-temporal patterns of growing urbanization. In this work, we extend UNet-type architectures to perform binary building footprint classification based on Sentinel-2 imagery resulting in five different models. While previous studies focused on urban areas in the Western world we conduct all training and evaluation in India. All models are trained on Microsoft building footprint products while for evaluation purposes high-quality reference data is manually selected from regions with especially good open-street-map coverage. Quantitative and qualitative experiments are conducted where a significant performance gain is found for a model trained with a mixture of aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty measures. The performance gain is even more pronounced for subsequent quantitative multi-temporal change detection experiments.