Semisupervised SAR image change detection based on a siamese variational autoencoder

In synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image change detection, the deep learning has attracted increasingly more attention because the difference images (DIs) of traditional unsupervised technology are vulnerable to speckle noise. However, most of the existing deep networks do not constrain the distributional characteristics of the hidden space, which may affect the feature representation performance. This paper proposes a variational autoencoder (VAE) network with the siamese structure to detect changes in SAR images. The VAE encodes the input as a probability distribution in the hidden space to obtain regular hidden layer features with a good representation ability. Furthermore, subnetworks with the same parameters and structure can extract the spatial consistency features of the original image, which is conducive to the subsequent classification. The proposed method includes three main steps. First, the training samples are selected based on the false labels generated by a clustering algorithm. Then, we train the proposed model with the semisupervised learning strategy, including unsupervised feature learning and supervised network fine-tuning. Finally, input the original data instead of the DIs in the trained network to obtain the change detection results. The experimental results on four real SAR datasets show the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method.