Change detection based on remote sensing (RS) data is an important method of detecting changes on the Earth’s surface and has a wide range of applications in urban planning, environmental monitoring, agriculture investigation, disaster assessment, and map revision. In recent years, integrated artificial intelligence (AI) technology has become a research focus in developing new change detection methods. Although some researchers claim that AI-based change detection approaches outperform traditional change detection approaches, it is not immediately obvious how and to what extent AI can improve the performance of change detection. This review focuses on the state-of-the-art methods, applications, and challenges of AI for change detection. Specifically, the implementation process of AI-based change detection is first introduced. Then, the data from different sensors used for change detection, including optical RS data, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data, street view images, and combined heterogeneous data, are presented, and the available open datasets are also listed. The general frameworks of AI-based change detection methods are reviewed and analyzed systematically, and the unsupervised schemes used in AI-based change detection are further analyzed. Subsequently, the commonly used networks in AI for change detection are described. From a practical point of view, the application domains of AI-based change detection methods are classified based on their applicability. Finally, the major challenges and prospects of AI for change detection are discussed and delineated, including (a) heterogeneous big data processing, (b) unsupervised AI, and (c) the reliability of AI. This review will be beneficial for researchers in understanding this field.

Change detection based on remote sensing (RS) images has a wide range of applications in many fields. However, many existing approaches for detecting changes in RS images with complex land covers still have room for improvement. In this article, a high-resolution RS image change detection approach based on a deep feature difference convolutional neural network (CNN) is proposed. This approach uses a CNN to learn the deep features from RS images and then uses transfer learning to compose a two-channel network with shared weight to generate a multiscale and multidepth feature difference map for change detection. The network is trained by a change magnitude guided loss function proposed in this article and needs to train with only a few pixel-level samples to generate change magnitude maps, which can help to remove some of the pseudochanges. Finally, the binary change map can be obtained by a threshold. The approach is tested on several data sets from different sensors, including WorldView-3, QuickBird, and Ziyuan-3. The experimental results show that the proposed approach achieves better performance compared with other classic approaches and has fewer missed detections and false alarms, which proves that the proposed approach has strong robustness and generalization ability.

Standard deviational ellipse (SDE) has long served as a versatile GIS tool for delineating the geographic distribution of concerned features. This paper firstly summarizes two existing models of calculating SDE, and then proposes a novel approach to constructing the same SDE based on spectral decomposition of the sample covariance, by which the SDE concept is naturally generalized into higher dimensional Euclidean space, named standard deviational hyper-ellipsoid (SDHE). Then, rigorous recursion formulas are derived for calculating the confidence levels of scaled SDHE with arbitrary magnification ratios in any dimensional space. Besides, an inexact-newton method based iterative algorithm is also proposed for solving the corresponding magnification ratio of a scaled SDHE when the confidence probability and space dimensionality are pre-specified. These results provide an efficient manner to supersede the traditional table lookup of tabulated chi-square distribution. Finally, synthetic data is employed to generate the 1-3 multiple SDEs and SDHEs. And exploratory analysis by means of SDEs and SDHEs are also conducted for measuring the spread concentrations of Hong Kong’s H1N1 in 2009.