Patch‐based change detection method for sar images with label updating strategy

Abstract

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been widely used in change detection of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images and have been proven to have better precision than traditional methods. A two‐stage patch‐based deep learning method with a label updating strategy is proposed in this paper. The initial label and mask are generated at the pre‐classification stage. Then a two‐stage updating strategy is applied to gradually recover changed areas. At the first stage, diversity of training data is gradually restored. The output of the designed CNN network is further processed to generate a new label and a new mask for the following learning iteration. As the diversity of data is ensured after the first stage, pixels within uncertain areas can be easily classified at the second stage. Experiment results on several representative datasets show the effectiveness of our proposed method compared with several existing competitive methods.