A Robust Imbalanced SAR Image Change Detection Approach Based on Deep Difference Image and PCANet

In this research, a novel robust change detection approach is presented for imbalanced multi-temporal synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image based on deep learning. Our main contribution is to develop a novel method for generating difference image and a parallel fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering method. The main steps of our proposed approach are as follows: 1) Inspired by convolution and pooling in deep learning, a deep difference image (DDI) is obtained based on parameterized pooling leading to better speckle suppression and feature enhancement than traditional difference images. 2) Two different parameter Sigmoid nonlinear mapping are applied to the DDI to get two mapped DDIs. Parallel FCM are utilized on these two mapped DDIs to obtain three types of pseudo-label pixels, namely, changed pixels, unchanged pixels, and intermediate pixels. 3) A PCANet with support vector machine (SVM) are trained to classify intermediate pixels to be changed or unchanged. Three imbalanced multi-temporal SAR image sets are used for change detection experiments. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach is effective and robust for imbalanced SAR data, and achieve up to 99.52% change detection accuracy superior to most state-of-the-art methods.