Coarse-to-fine satellite images change detection framework via boundary-aware attentive network

Timely and accurate change detection on satellite images by using computer vision techniques has been attracting lots of research efforts in recent years. Existing approaches based on deep learning frameworks have achieved good performance for the task of change detection on satellite images. However, under the scenario of disjoint changed areas in various shapes on land surface, existing methods still have shortcomings in detecting all changed areas correctly and representing the changed areas boundary. To deal with these problems, we design a coarse-to-fine detection framework via a boundary-aware attentive network with a hybrid loss to detect the change in high resolution satellite images. Specifically, we first perform an attention guided encoder-decoder subnet to obtain the coarse change map of the bi-temporal image pairs, and then apply residual learning to obtain the refined change map. We also propose a hybrid loss to provide the supervision from pixel, patch, and map levels. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on two benchmark datasets: LEBEDEV and SZTAKI to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method and the experimental results show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance.