Change Detection From Synthetic Aperture Radar Images Based on Channel Weighting-Based Deep Cascade Network

Abstract

Deep learning methods have recently demonstrated their significant capability for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image change detection. However, with the increase of network depth, convolutional neural networks often encounter some negative effects, such as overfitting and exploding gradients. In addition, the existing deep networks employed in SAR change detection tend to produce a lot of redundant features that affect the performance of the network. To solve the aforementioned problems, this article proposed a deep cascade network (DCNet) for SAR image change detection. On the one hand, a very DCNet is established to exploit discriminative features, and residual learning is introduced to solve the exploding gradients problem. In addition, a fusion mechanism is employed to combine the outputs of different hierarchical layers to further alleviate the exploding gradient problem. Moreover, a simple yet effective channel weighting-based module is designed for SAR change detection. Average pooling and max pooling are used to aggregate channel-wise information. Meaningful channel-wise features are emphasized and unnecessary ones are suppressed. Therefore, the similarity in feature maps can be reduced, and then, the classification performance of the DCNet is improved. Experimental results on four real SAR datasets demonstrated that the proposed DCNet can obtain better change detection performance than several competitive methods. Our codes are available at https://github.com/summitgao/SAR_CD_DCNet.