Large-Area Land-Cover Changes Monitoring With Time-Series Remote Sensing Images Using Transferable Deep Models

Dense time-series remote sensing images have transformed the traditional bitemporal land-cover change detection to continuous monitoring. Previous work mostly employs linear fitting, prediction, or decomposition methods, and the detection accuracy is not high. The latest progress of deep learning (DL) shows its advantages in time-series change monitoring. However, DL models are computationally expensive and require lots of labeled samples, resulting in often employed prediction-threshold-based unsupervised change detection method. However, the determination of a reasonable threshold has always been a big problem. Therefore, we proposed the similarity-measurement-based deep transfer learning for time-series adaptive change detection (SDTL-TSACD) model. First, a standard dynamic time warping (SDTW) distance was proposed and used to cluster large-scale time series into multiple subcategories with high time-series similarity. Second, a time convolutional network (TCN) was used for nonlinear time-series fitting and prediction, and an early stop strategy was used to prevent overfitting. Then, the trained TCN model would be transferred and performed pixel-by-pixel time-series prediction within the same category, and the SDTW was also used to evaluate the prediction accuracy. Finally, the Otsu adaptive threshold was used to detect change points, and the spatial neighbor relationship was used to eliminate the pseudo-change points. Change detection results using 132 benchmark datasets showed that the SDTL-TSACD performed well in both accuracy and efficiency. In addition, the MOD13Q1-EVI images from 2001 to 2020 were used to study the land-cover change of the Loess Plateau, and the SDTL-TSACD also showed a good ability to solve practical problems.