S2C: Learning Noise-Resistant Differences for Unsupervised Change Detection in Multimodal Remote Sensing Images
This work addresses the challenge of detecting changes in heterogeneous remote sensing data without supervision, offering a robust solution for applications like environmental monitoring, though it is incremental in its methodological advancements.
The paper tackles unsupervised change detection in multimodal remote sensing images by introducing a Semantic-to-Change (S2C) learning framework, which uses a novel triplet learning strategy to model temporal differences and achieves accuracy improvements of over 31%, 9%, 23%, and 15% on four benchmark datasets compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Unsupervised Change Detection (UCD) in multimodal Remote Sensing (RS) images remains a difficult challenge due to the inherent spatio-temporal complexity within data, and the heterogeneity arising from different imaging sensors. Inspired by recent advancements in Visual Foundation Models (VFMs) and Contrastive Learning (CL) methodologies, this research aims to develop CL methodologies to translate implicit knowledge in VFM into change representations, thus eliminating the need for explicit supervision. To this end, we introduce a Semantic-to-Change (S2C) learning framework for UCD in both homogeneous and multimodal RS images. Differently from existing CL methodologies that typically focus on learning multi-temporal similarities, we introduce a novel triplet learning strategy that explicitly models temporal differences, which are crucial to the CD task. Furthermore, random spatial and spectral perturbations are introduced during the training to enhance robustness to temporal noise. In addition, a grid sparsity regularization is defined to suppress insignificant changes, and an IoU-matching algorithm is developed to refine the CD results. Experiments on four benchmark CD datasets demonstrate that the proposed S2C learning framework achieves significant improvements in accuracy, surpassing current state-of-the-art by over 31\%, 9\%, 23\%, and 15\%, respectively. It also demonstrates robustness and sample efficiency, suitable for training and adaptation of various Visual Foundation Models (VFMs) or backbone neural networks. The relevant code will be available at: github.com/DingLei14/S2C.