Deep Metric Learning for Unsupervised Remote Sensing Change Detection

Remote Sensing Change Detection (RS-CD) aims to detect relevant changes from Multi-Temporal Remote Sensing Images (MT-RSIs), which aids in various RS applications such as land cover, land use, human development analysis, and disaster response. The performance of existing RS-CD methods is attributed to training on large annotated datasets. Furthermore, most of these models are less transferable in the sense that the trained model often performs very poorly when there is a domain gap between training and test datasets. This paper proposes an unsupervised CD method based on deep metric learning that can deal with both of these issues. Given an MT-RSI, the proposed method generates corresponding change probability map by iteratively optimizing an unsupervised CD loss without training it on a large dataset. Our unsupervised CD method consists of two interconnected deep networks, namely Deep-Change Probability Generator (D-CPG) and Deep-Feature Extractor (D-FE). The D-CPG is designed to predict change and no change probability maps for a given MT-RSI, while D-FE is used to extract deep features of MT-RSI that will be further used in the proposed unsupervised CD loss. We use transfer learning capability to initialize the parameters of D-FE. We iteratively optimize the parameters of D-CPG and D-FE for a given MT-RSI by minimizing the proposed unsupervised similarity-dissimilarity loss. This loss is motivated by the principle of metric learning where we simultaneously maximize the distance between change pairwise pixels while mini-mizing the distance between no-change pairwise pixels in bi-temporal image domain and their deep feature domain. The experiments conducted on three CD datasets show that our unsupervised CD method achieves significant improvements over the state-of-the-art supervised and unsupervised CD methods. Code and pretrained models available at https://github.com/wgcban/Metric-CD