Detection of road surface changes from multi-temporal unmanned aerial vehicle images using a convolutional siamese network

Abstract

Road quality commonly decreases due to aging and deterioration of road surfaces. As the number of roads that need to be surveyed increases, general maintenance-particularly surveillance-can be quite costly if carried out using traditional methods. Therefore, using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and deep learning to detect changes via surveys is a promising strategy. This study proposes a method for detecting changes on road surfaces using pairs of UAV images captured at different times. First, a convolutional Siamese network is introduced to extract the features of an image pair and a Euclidean distance function is applied to calculate the distance between two features. Then, a contrastive loss function is used to enlarge the distance between changed feature pairs and reduce the distance between unchanged feature pairs. Finally, the initial change map is improved based on the preliminary differences between the two input images. Our experimental results confirm the effectiveness of this approach.