Change detection (CD) in multitemporal images is an important application of remote sensing. Recent technological evolution provided very high spatial resolution (VHR) multitemporal optical satellite images showing high spatial correlation among pixels and requiring an effective modeling of spatial context to accurately capture change information. Here, we propose a novel unsupervised context-sensitive framework--deep change vector analysis (DCVA)--for CD in multitemporal VHR images that exploit convolutional neural network (CNN) features. To have an unsupervised system, DCVA starts from a suboptimal pretrained multilayered CNN for obtaining deep features that can model spatial relationship among neighboring pixels and thus complex objects. An automatic feature selection strategy is employed layerwise to select features emphasizing both high and low prior probability change information. Selected features from multiple layers are combined into a deep feature hypervector providing a multiscale scene representation. The use of the same pretrained CNN for semantic segmentation of single images enables us to obtain coherent multitemporal deep feature hypervectors that can be compared pixelwise to obtain deep change vectors that also model spatial context information. Deep change vectors are analyzed based on their magnitude to identify changed pixels. Then, deep change vectors corresponding to identified changed pixels are binarized to obtain a compressed binary deep change vectors that preserve information about the direction (kind) of change. Changed pixels are analyzed for multiple CD based on the binary features, thus implicitly using the spatial information. Experimental results on multitemporal data sets of Worldview-2, Pleiades, and Quickbird images confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Building change detection (CD), important for its application in urban monitoring, can be performed in near real time by comparing prechange and postchange very-high-spatial-resolution (VHR) synthetic-aperture-radar (SAR) images. However, multitemporal VHR SAR images are complex as they show high spatial correlation, prone to shadows, and show an inhomogeneous signature. Spatial context needs to be taken into account to effectively detect a change in such images. Recently, convolutional-neural-network (CNN)-based transfer learning techniques have shown strong performance for CD in VHR multispectral images. However, its direct use for SAR CD is impeded by the absence of labeled SAR data and, thus, pretrained networks. To overcome this, we exploit the availability of paired unlabeled SAR and optical images to train for the suboptimal task of transcoding SAR images into optical images using a cycle-consistent generative adversarial network (CycleGAN). The CycleGAN consists of two generator networks: one for transcoding SAR images into the optical image domain and the other for projecting optical images into the SAR image domain. After unsupervised training, the generator transcoding SAR images into optical ones is used as a bitemporal deep feature extractor to extract optical-like features from bitemporal SAR images. Thus, deep change vector analysis (DCVA) and fuzzy rules can be applied to identify changed buildings (new/destroyed). We validate our method on two data sets made up of pairs of bitemporal VHR SAR images on the city of L'Aquila (Italy) and Trento (Italy).

Most change detection (CD) methods assume that prechange and postchange images are acquired by the same sensor. However, in many real-life scenarios, e.g., natural disasters, it is more practical to use the latest available images before and after the occurrence of incidence, which may be acquired using different sensors. In particular, we are interested in the combination of the images acquired by optical and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensors. SAR images appear vastly different from the optical images even when capturing the same scene. Adding to this, CD methods are often constrained to use only target image-pair, no labeled data, and no additional unlabeled data. Such constraints limit the scope of traditional supervised machine learning and unsupervised generative approaches for multisensor CD. The recent rapid development of self-supervised learning methods has shown that some of them can even work with only few images. Motivated by this, in this work, we propose a method for multisensor CD using only the unlabeled target bitemporal images that are used for training a network in a self-supervised fashion by using deep clustering and contrastive learning. The proposed method is evaluated on four multimodal bitemporal scenes showing change, and the benefits of our self-supervised approach are demonstrated. Code is available at https://gitlab.lrz.de/ai4eo/cd/-/tree/main/sarOpticalMultisensorTgrs2021.

Band selection refers to the process of choosing the most relevant bands in a hyperspectral image. By selecting a limited number of optimal bands, we aim at speeding up model training, improving accuracy, or both. It reduces redundancy among spectral bands while trying to preserve the original information of the image. By now, many efforts have been made to develop unsupervised band selection approaches, of which the majorities are heuristic algorithms devised by trial and error. In this article, we are interested in training an intelligent agent that, given a hyperspectral image, is capable of automatically learning policy to select an optimal band subset without any hand-engineered reasoning. To this end, we frame the problem of unsupervised band selection as a Markov decision process, propose an effective method to parameterize it, and finally solve the problem by deep reinforcement learning. Once the agent is trained, it learns a band-selection policy that guides the agent to sequentially select bands by fully exploiting the hyperspectral image and previously picked bands. Furthermore, we propose two different reward schemes for the environment simulation of deep reinforcement learning and compare them in experiments. This, to the best of our knowledge, is the first study that explores a deep reinforcement learning model for hyperspectral image analysis, thus opening a new door for future research and showcasing the great potential of deep reinforcement learning in remote sensing applications. Extensive experiments are carried out on four hyperspectral data sets, and experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The code is publicly available.

Most change detection (CD) methods are unsupervised as collecting substantial multitemporal training data is challenging. Unsupervised CD methods are driven by heuristics and lack the capability to learn from data. However, in many real-world applications, it is possible to collect a small amount of labeled data scattered across the analyzed scene. Such a few scattered labeled samples in the pool of unlabeled samples can be effectively handled by graph convolutional network (GCN) that has recently shown good performance in semisupervised single-date analysis, to improve change detection performance. Based on this, we propose a semisupervised CD method that encodes multitemporal images as a graph via multiscale parcel segmentation that effectively captures the spatial and spectral aspects of the multitemporal images. The graph is further processed through GCN to learn a multitemporal model. Information from the labeled parcels is propagated to the unlabeled ones over training iterations. By exploiting the homogeneity of the parcels, the model is used to infer the label at a pixel level. To show the effectiveness of the proposed method, we tested it on a multitemporal Very High spatial Resolution (VHR) data set acquired by Pleiades sensor over Trento, Italy.

Remote sensing deals with a plethora of sensors, a large number of classes/categories, and a huge variation in geography. Due to the difficulty of collecting labeled data uniformly representing all scenarios, data-hungry deep learning models are often trained with labeled data in a source domain that is limited in the above-mentioned aspects. However, during the test/inference phase, such deep learning models are often subjected to a distributional shift, also called out-of-distribution (OOD) samples, in the form of unseen classes, geographic differences, and multisensor differences. Deep learning models can behave in an unexpected manner when subjected to such distributional uncertainties. Vulnerability to OOD data severely reduces the reliability of deep learning models and trusting on such predictions in the absence of any reliability indicator may lead to wrong policy decisions or mishaps in time-bound remote sensing applications. Motivated by this, in this work, we propose a Dirichlet prior network-based model to quantify the distributional uncertainty of deep learning-based remote sensing models. The approach seeks to maximize the representation gap between the in-domain and OOD examples for better segregation of OOD samples at test time. Extensive experiments on several remote sensing image classification datasets demonstrate that the proposed model can quantify distributional uncertainty. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to elaborately study distributional uncertainty in context of remote sensing. The codes are publicly available at https://gitlab.lrz.de/ai4eo/Uncertainty/-/tree/main/DPN-RS .