Change detection (CD) aims to identify surface changes from bitemporal images. In recent years, deep learning (DL)-based methods have made substantial breakthroughs in the field of CD. However, CD results can be easily affected by external factors, including illumination, noise, and scale, which leads to pseudo-changes and noise in the detection map. To deal with these problems and achieve more accurate results, a deeply supervised (DS) attention metric-based network (DSAMNet) is proposed in this article. A metric module is employed in DSAMNet to learn change maps by means of deep metric learning, in which convolutional block attention modules (CBAM) are integrated to provide more discriminative features. As an auxiliary, a DS module is introduced to enhance the feature extractor’s learning ability and generate more useful features. Moreover, another challenge encountered by data-driven DL algorithms is posed by the limitations in change detection datasets (CDDs). Therefore, we create a CD dataset, Sun Yat-Sen University (SYSU)-CD, for bitemporal image CD, which contains a total of 20 000 aerial image pairs of size $256\times256$ . Experiments are conducted on both the CDD and the SYSU-CD dataset. Compared to other state-of-the-art methods, our network achieves the highest accuracy on both datasets, with an F1 of 93.69% on the CDD dataset and 78.18% on the SYSU-CD dataset.

Nonagriculturalization incidents are serious threats to local agricultural ecosystem and global food security. Remote sensing change detection (CD) can provide an effective approach for in-time detection and prevention of such incidents. However, existing CD methods are difficult to deal with the large intraclass differences of cropland changes in high-resolution images. In addition, traditional CNN based models are plagued by the loss of long-range context information, and the high computational complexity brought by deep layers. Therefore, in this article, we propose a CNN-transformer network with multiscale context aggregation (MSCANet), which combines the merits of CNN and transformer to fulfill efficient and effective cropland CD. In the MSCANet, a CNN-based feature extractor is first utilized to capture hierarchical features, then a transformer-based MSCA is designed to encode and aggregate context information. Finally, a multibranch prediction head with three CNN classifiers is applied to obtain change maps, to enhance the supervision for deep layers. Besides, for the lack of CD dataset with fine-grained cropland change of interest, we also provide a new cropland change detection dataset, which contains 600 pairs of 512 × 512 bi-temporal images with the spatial resolution of 0.5–2m. Comparative experiments with several CD models prove the effectiveness of the MSCANet, with the highest F1 of 64.67% on the high-resolution semantic CD dataset, and of 71.29% on CLCD.

The rapid development in deep learning and computer vision has introduced new opportunities and paradigms for building extraction from remote sensing images. In this paper, we propose a novel fully convolutional network (FCN), in which a spatial residual inception (SRI) module is proposed to capture and aggregate multi-scale contexts for semantic understanding by successively fusing multi-level features. The proposed SRI-Net is capable of accurately detecting large buildings that might be easily omitted while retaining global morphological characteristics and local details. On the other hand, to improve computational efficiency, depthwise separable convolutions and convolution factorization are introduced to significantly decrease the number of model parameters. The proposed model is evaluated on the Inria Aerial Image Labeling Dataset and the Wuhan University (WHU) Aerial Building Dataset. The experimental results show that the proposed methods exhibit significant improvements compared with several state-of-the-art FCNs, including SegNet, U-Net, RefineNet, and DeepLab v3+. The proposed model shows promising potential for building detection from remote sensing images on a large scale.

Change detection (CD) aims to distinguish surface changes based on bitemporal images. Since high-resolution (HR) images cannot be typically acquired continuously over time, bitemporal images with different resolutions are often adopted for CD in practical applications. Traditional subpixel-based methods for CD using images with different resolutions may lead to substantial error accumulation when the HR images are employed, which is because of intraclass heterogeneity and interclass similarity. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a novel method for CD using images with different resolutions that are more suitable for the HR images. To this end, we propose a super-resolution-based change detection network (SRCDNet) with a stacked attention module (SAM). The SRCDNet employs a super-resolution (SR) module containing a generator and a discriminator to directly learn the SR images through adversarial learning and overcome the resolution difference between the bitemporal images. To enhance the useful information in multiscale features, a SAM consisting of five convolutional block attention modules (CBAMs) is integrated to the feature extractor. The final change map is obtained through a metric learning-based change decision module, wherein a distance map between bitemporal features is calculated. Ablation study and comparative experiments on two large datasets, building change detection dataset (BCDD) and season-varying change detection dataset (CDD), and a real-image experiment on the Google dataset fully demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method. The source code of SRCDNet is available at https://github.com/liumency/SRCDNet.

Urban green space (UGS) is an important component in the urban ecosystem and has great significance to the urban ecological environment. Although the development of remote sensing platforms and deep learning technologies have provided opportunities for UGS mapping from high-resolution images (HRIs), challenges still exist in its large-scale and fine-grained application due to insufficient annotated datasets and specially designed methods for UGS. Moreover, the domain shift between images from different regions is also a problem that must be solved. To address these issues, a general deep learning (DL) framework is proposed for UGS mapping in the large scale, and fine-grained UGS maps of 31 major cities in mainland China are generated (UGS-1m). The DL framework consists of a generator and a discriminator. The generator is a fully convolutional network designed for UGS extraction (UGSNet), which integrates attention mechanisms to improve the discrimination to UGS, and employs a point-rending strategy for edge recovery. The discriminator is a fully connected network aiming to deal with the domain shift between images. To support the model training, an urban green space dataset (UGSet) with a total number of 4544 samples of 512×512 in size is provided. The main steps to obtain UGS-1m can be summarized as follows: (a) first, the UGSNet will be pre-trained on the UGSet in order to obtain a good starting training point for the generator. (b) After pre-training on the UGSet, the discriminator is responsible for adapting the pre-trained UGSNet to different cities through adversarial training. (c) Finally, the UGS results of 31 major cities in China (UGS-1m) are obtained using 2179 Google Earth images with a data frame of 7^′30^′′ in longitude and 5^′00^′′ in latitude and a spatial resolution of nearly 1.1 m. An evaluation of the performance of the proposed framework by samples from five different cities shows the validity of the UGS-1m products, with an average overall accuracy (OA) of 87.56 % and an F1 score of 74.86 %. Comparative experiments on UGSet with the existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) DL models proves the effectiveness of UGSNet as the generator, with the highest F1 score of 77.30 %. Furthermore, an ablation study on the discriminator fully reveals the necessity and effectiveness of introducing the discriminator into adversarial learning for domain adaptation. Finally, a comparison with existing products further shows the feasibility of the UGS-1m and the great potential of the proposed DL framework. The UGS-1m can be downloaded from https://doi.org/10.57760/sciencedb.07049 (Shi et al., 2023).

Building change detection (BCD) is significant for urban planning and environmental protection. In view of the interclass similarity and intraclass difference of building changes in complex built-up area, specialized solutions have been introduced in BCD. Mainstream methods include extracting building prior information in advance and enhancing long-range context information. These methods often require additional processing and ignore the construction of cross-temporal context information, resulting in deficiencies on CD performance and efficiency. Therefore, an end-to-end PA-Former for BCD is proposed in this letter, which combines prior extraction and contextual fusion together by learning prior-aware Transformer. Specifically, the PA-Former adopts a prior-feature extractor (PFE) to capture prior and deep features from the bitemporal images, in which a prior interpreter (PI) is integrated to obtain priori structural information of buildings. Besides, a prior-aware Transformer module (PATM) is designed to obtain contextual tokens with spatiotemporal information from the prior features and integrate into the deep features. Extensive experiments with state-of-the-art methods are conducted for comparison. In particular, the PA-Former surpasses the baselines with an F1 of 88.79% on the BCDD dataset and that of 85.32% on the Google dataset.