Fully Convolutional Change Detection Framework With Generative Adversarial Network for Unsupervised, Weakly Supervised and Regional Supervised Change Detection

Deep learning for change detection is one of the current hot topics in the field of remote sensing. However, most end-to-end networks are proposed for supervised change detection, and unsupervised change detection models depend on traditional pre-detection methods. Therefore, we proposed a fully convolutional change detection framework with generative adversarial network, to unify unsupervised, weakly supervised, regional supervised, and fully supervised change detection tasks into one end-to-end framework. A basic Unet segmentor is used to obtain change detection map, an image-to-image generator is implemented to model the spectral and spatial variation between multi-temporal images, and a discriminator for changed and unchanged is proposed for modeling the semantic changes in weakly and regional supervised change detection task. The iterative optimization of segmentor and generator can build an end-to-end network for unsupervised change detection, the adversarial process between segmentor and discriminator can provide the solutions for weakly and regional supervised change detection, the segmentor itself can be trained for fully supervised task. The experiments indicate the effectiveness of the propsed framework in unsupervised, weakly supervised and regional supervised change detection. This article provides new theorical definitions for unsupervised, weakly supervised and regional supervised change detection tasks with the proposed framework, and shows great potentials in exploring end-to-end network for remote sensing change detection (https://github.com/Cwuwhu/FCD-GAN-pytorch).