Change detection (CD) by comparing two bi-temporal images is a crucial task
in remote sensing. With the advantages of requiring no cumbersome labeled
change information, unsupervised CD has attracted extensive attention in the
community. However, existing unsupervised CD approaches rarely consider the
seasonal and style differences incurred by the illumination and atmospheric
conditions in multi-temporal images. To this end, we propose a change detection
with domain shift setting for remote sensing images. Furthermore, we present a
novel unsupervised CD method using a light-weight transformer, called
UCDFormer. Specifically, a transformer-driven image translation composed of a
light-weight transformer and a domain-specific affinity weight is first
proposed to mitigate domain shift between two images with real-time efficiency.
After image translation, we can generate the difference map between the
translated before-event image and the original after-event image. Then, a novel
reliable pixel extraction module is proposed to select significantly
changed/unchanged pixel positions by fusing the pseudo change maps of fuzzy
c-means clustering and adaptive threshold. Finally, a binary change map is
obtained based on these selected pixel pairs and a binary classifier.
Experimental results on different unsupervised CD tasks with seasonal and style
changes demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed UCDFormer. For example,
compared with several other related methods, UCDFormer improves performance on
the Kappa coefficient by more than 12\%. In addition, UCDFormer achieves
excellent performance for earthquake-induced landslide detection when
considering large-scale applications. The code is available at
https://github.com/zhu-xlab/UCDFormer

本研究提出了一种基于领域转换的无监督遥感图像变化检测方法 UCDFormer，通过使用轻量级 Transformer 和特定领域亲和力权重的图像转换来减轻多时相图像中的季节性和风格差异，并通过模糊 C 均值聚类和自适应阈值的伪变化图和可靠像素提取模块选择显著变化 / 未变化的像素位置，以获得二值变化图。实验结果表明 UCDFormer 在处理季节性和风格变化的无监督遥感图像变化检测任务时取得了显著的性能提升，Kappa 系数的性能提升超过了 12%。对于大规模应用的地震引发的滑坡检测，UCDFormer 也取得了出色的性能。