Change detection is a process of identifying changed ground objects by comparing image pairs obtained at different times. Compared with the pixel-level and object-level change detection, scene-level change detection can provide the semantic changes at image level, so it is important for many applications related to change descriptions and explanations such as urban functional area change monitoring. Automatic scene-level change detection approaches do not require ground truth used for training, making them more appealing in practical applications than non-automatic methods. However, the existing automatic scene-level change detection methods only utilize low-level and mid-level features to extract changes between bi-temporal images, failing to fully exploit the deep information. This paper proposed a novel automatic binary scene-level change detection approach based on deep learning to address these issues. First, the pre-trained VGG-16 and change vector analysis is adopted for scene-level direct pre-detection to produce a scene-level pseudo change map. Second, pixel-level classification is implemented by using decision tree, and a pixel-level to scene-level conversion strategy is designed to generate the other scene-level pseudo change map. Third, the scene-level training samples are obtained by fusing the two pseudo change maps. Finally, the binary scene-level change map is produced by training a novel Scene Change Detection Triplet Network (SCDTN). The proposed SCDTN integrates a late-fusion sub-network and an early-fusion sub-network, comprehensively mining the deep information in each raw image as well as the temporal correlation between two raw images. Experiments were performed on a public dataset and a new challenging dataset, and the results demonstrated the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed approach.

Impervious surfaces are commonly acknowledged as major components of human settlements. The expansion of impervious surfaces could lead to a series of human−dominated environmental and ecological issues. Tracing impervious surface dynamics at a finer temporal−spatial scale is a critical way to better understand the increasingly human-dominated system of Earth. In this study, we put forward a new scheme to conduct long-term monitoring of impervious−relevant land disturbances using high frequency Landsat archives and the Google Earth Engine (GEE). First, the developed region was identified using a classification-based approach. Then, the GEE-version LandTrendr (Landsat-based detection of Trends in Disturbance and Recovery) was used to detect land disturbances, characterizing the conversion from vegetation to impervious surfaces. Finally, the actual disturbance areas within the developed regions were derived and quantitatively evaluated. A case study was conducted to detect impervious surface dynamics in Nanjing, China, from 1988 to 2018. Results show that our scheme can efficiently monitor impervious surface dynamics at yearly intervals with good accuracy. The overall accuracy (OA) of the classification results for 1988 and 2018 are 95.86% and 94.14%. Based on temporal−spatial accuracy assessments of the final detection result, the temporal accuracy is 90.75%, and the average detection time deviation is −1.28 a. The OA, precision, and recall of the sampling inspection, respectively, are 84.34%, 85.43%, and 96.37%. This scheme provides new insights into capturing the expansion of impervious−relevant land disturbances with high frequency Landsat archives in an efficient way.

The utilisation of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery for change detection can effectively circumvents the stringent limitations imposed by weather and lighting conditions, and is finding widespread applications in fields such as disaster monitoring and urban research. To address issues of edge blurring, severe noise interference and sample imbalance, an automated SAR change detection framework is proposed based on enhanced edge information and prototype constrained clustering. Firstly, a gradient-based neighbourhood ratio is designed to reinforce the edge information of the difference map, facilitating robust differential information representations. Subsequently, to obtain accurate samples in an unsupervised manner, we have developed prototype constrained hierarchical clustering for pre-classification. The quantity and quality of selected samples can be precisely guaranteed through the utilisation of histogram analysis and prototype constraints. In the sample learning and prediction phases, a class-balanced noise-tolerant change detection network is proposed that combines focal loss and mean absolute error loss, further tackling the sample imbalance issue, strengthening noise resistance and improving change detection accuracy. Comprehensive experimental results and analysis conducted on five benchmark datasets have validated the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method.

Change detection is a research hotspot in the remote sensing field. In this letter, an unsupervised change detection method was proposed by optimizing two critical steps, i.e., the generation and analysis of difference image. First, the difference vectors of features are calculated using the simple differencing method. Some changed and unchanged pixels are generated by the majority voting on the results produced by clustering the difference vectors and then are used for the weight calculation of difference vectors. The weights are calculated by means of F-Score and considered in the weighted change vector analysis to produce a discriminative difference image. Finally, the change map is obtained by the improved Markov random field which takes the difference in the neighborhood pixel values into account. Experimental results on three data sets demonstrated that the proposed method outperformed six unsupervised change detection methods in terms of overall accuracy.

The area of urban impervious surfaces is one of the most important indicators for determining the level of urbanisation and the quality of the environment and is rapidly increasing with the acceleration of urbanisation in developing countries. This paper proposes a novel remote sensing index based on the coastal band and normalised difference vegetation index for extracting impervious surface distribution from Landsat 8 multispectral remote sensing imagery. The index was validated using three images covering urban areas of China and was compared with five other typical index methods for the extraction of impervious surface distribution, namely, the normalised difference built-up index, index-based built-up index, normalised difference impervious surface index, normalised difference impervious index, and combinational built-up index. The results showed that the novel index provided higher accuracy and effectively distinguished impervious surfaces from bare soil, and the average values of the recall, precision, and F1 score for the three images were 95%, 91%, and 93%, respectively. The novel index provides better applicability in the extraction of urban impervious surface distribution from Landsat 8 multispectral remote sensing imagery.

Accurate and timely information on urban vegetation (UV) can be used as an important indicator to estimate the health of cities. Due to the low cost of RGB cameras, true color imagery (TCI) has been widely used for high spatial resolution UV mapping. However, the current index-based and classifier-based UV mapping approaches face problems of the poor ability to accurately distinguish UV and the high reliance on massive annotated samples, respectively. To address this issue, an index-guided semantic segmentation (IGSS) framework is proposed in this paper. Firstly, a novel cross-scale vegetation index (CSVI) is calculated by the combination of TCI and Sentinel-2 images, and the index value can be used to provide an initial UV map. Secondly, reliable UV and non-UV samples are automatically generated for training the semantic segmentation model, and then the refined UV map can be produced. The experimental results show that the proposed CSVI outperformed the existing five RGB vegetation indices in highlighting UV cover and suppressing complex backgrounds, and the proposed IGSS workflow achieved satisfactory results with an OA of 87.72% ∼ 88.16% and an F1 score of 87.73% ∼ 88.37%, which is comparable with the fully-supervised method.