A Unified Deep Learning Network for Remote Sensing Image Registration and Change Detection

Image registration and change detection are crucial for multitemporal remote sensing image analysis. The images should be registered before the change information detection. Existing deep learning methods have shown significant advantages in image registration and change detection tasks. They usually design two independent task-specific deep networks for image registration and change detection, respectively. These independent deep networks will learn from scratch and rely on many task-specific labeled training datasets. This article finds that image registration and change detection have similar learning mechanisms, which focus on extracting discriminative features. Inspired by this, we propose a Unified image Registration and Change detection Network (URCNet) that can perform image alignment and change information detection through a single network. Additionally, this article proposes various deep collaborative learning methods for URCNet optimization, which enforce that the URCNet can effectively support remote sensing image registration and change detection simultaneously. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed URCNet for image registration and change detection, which can achieve comparable and better results with task-specific and more complex deep networks. The proposed URCNet can support multitasks based on the same scene images, different scene images, and even multimodal images. Moreover, URCNet shows significant advantages over other deep networks in change detection under limited labeled datasets.

I. Introduction

Image registration and change detection are crucial for remote sensing image applications, such as land resource management and disaster information estimation [1], [2]. Image registration focuses on aligning images acquired at different times, from different viewpoints, or by various sensors [3], [4], which is widely used for multitemporal image analysis, multiview image processing, and multimodal image fusion. Image change detection task aims to identify the change information between the aligned multitemporal images [5], [6]. Thus, image registration is the basis of change detection.