SAR Images Change Detection Based on Self-Adaptive Network Architecture

In the last few years, neural networks were introduced to change detection for a better understanding of remote sensing images. However, the designs of these neural networks were time-consuming processes of trial and error, which failed to account for their validity. Thus, a simple and efficient change detection method based on network architecture search in terms of the evolutionary algorithm is proposed to deal with SAR images change detection problems. In the proposed method, an efficient gene encoding is applied to represent the unpredictable optimal depth and the number of neurons in each hidden layer. Besides, a combinatorial evaluation strategy and a self-adaptive network solution selection are designed for effective and reasonable network architectures. What is more, a hidden layer random alignment crossover operator and a drawing lots mutation operator are designed for the enhancement of diversity of network architectures. Experimental results on a few SAR image data sets demonstrate that the proposed method can generate appropriate networks to solving SAR images change detection.

I. Introduction

SAR images change detection has been attracting increasingly interests along with the development of SAR systems. Benefit from its potential characteristics of all-weather and full-time working, SAR systems have been applied in many fields, such as disaster monitoring and resource exploration [1]–[3]. Wide applications of SAR systems provide rich SAR image resources for researches of change detection, which is leading to a bloom of SAR images change detection methods.