Change Detection for High-resolution Remote Sensing Images Based on a Siamese Structured UNet3+Network

The use of bi-temporal remote sensing images for detecting changes in land cover is an important means of obtaining surface change information, thus contributing to urban governance and ecological environment monitoring. In this article, we propose a deep learning model named Siam-UNet3+ for high-resolution remote sensing image change detection. This model integrates the full-scale skip connections and full-scale deep supervision of the network UNet3+, which can achieve the multi-scale feature fusion of remote sensing images, effectively avoiding the locality disadvantage of convolution operations. Different from UNet3+, Siam-UNet3+ has made major improvements, including the following: (1) incorporating a Siamese network in the encoder, which can process bi-temporal remote sensing images in parallel; (2) leveraging the residual module as the backbone, which can avoid gradient vanishing (or exploding) and model degradation problems; (3) adding a Triplet Attention module to the decoder, which can avoid information redundancy that may occur in full-scale skip connections and increase the ability to focus on changing patterns; and (4) designing a hybrid loss function consisting of focal loss and dice loss, which is more suitable for remote sensing image change detection tasks. In this study, we conducted change detection experiments using the publicly available LEVIR-CD dataset, as well as two local datasets in Beijing. Through comparative experiments with five other models and ablation experiments, the proposed model Siam-UNet3+ in this article demonstrated significant advantages and improvements in four evaluation metrics, namely, precision, recall, F1-score, and overall accuracy (OA), proving to have great potential in the application to high-resolution remote sensing image change detection tasks.