Unsupervised deep noise modeling for hyperspectral image change detection

Hyperspectral image (HSI) change detection plays an important role in remote sensing applications, and considerable research has been done focused on improving change detection performance. However, the high dimension of hyperspectral data makes it hard to extract discriminative features for hyperspectral processing tasks. Though deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) have superior capability in high-level semantic feature learning, it is difficult to employ CNN for change detection tasks. As a ground truth map is usually used for the evaluation of change detection algorithms, it cannot be directly used for supervised learning. In order to better extract discriminative CNN features, a novel noise modeling-based unsupervised fully convolutional network (FCN) framework is presented for HSI change detection in this paper. Specifically, the proposed method utilizes the change detection maps of existing unsupervised change detection methods to train the deep CNN, and then removes the noise during the end-to-end training process. The main contributions of this paper are threefold: (1) A new end-to-end FCN-based deep network architecture for HSI change detection is presented with powerful learning features; (2) An unsupervised noise modeling method is introduced for the robust training of the proposed deep network; (3) Experimental results on three datasets confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method.