Generative Adversarial Networks for Change Detection in Multispectral Imagery

Change detection can be treated as a generative learning procedure, in which the connection between bitemporal images and the desired change map can be modeled as a generative one. In this letter, we propose an unsupervised change detection method based on generative adversarial networks (GANs), which has the ability of recovering the training data distribution from noise input. Here, the joint distribution of the two images to be detected is taken as input and an initial difference image (DI), generated by traditional change detection method such as change vector analysis, is used to provide prior knowledge for sampling the training data based on Bayesian theorem and GAN’s min–max game theory. Through the continuous adversarial learning, the shared mapping function between the training data and their corresponding image patches can be built in GAN’s generator, from which a better DI can be generated. Finally, an unsupervised clustering algorithm is used to analyze the better DI to obtain the desired binary change map. Theoretical analysis and experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method.