Alteration detection of multispectral/hyperspectral images using dual-path partial recurrent networks

Numerous alteration detection methods are designed based on image transformation algorithms and divergence of bi-temporal images. In the process of feature transformation, pseudo variant information caused by complex external factors will be highlighted. As a result, the error of divergence between the two images will be further enhanced. In this paper, we propose to fuse the variability of Deep Neural Networks’ (DNNs) structure flexibly with various detection algorithms for bi-temporal multispectral/hyperspectral imagery alteration detection. Specifically, the novel Dual-path Partial Recurrent Networks (D-PRNs) was proposed to project more accurate and effective deep features. The Unsupervised Slow Feature Analysis (USFA), Iteratively Reweighted Multivariate Alteration Detection (IRMAD), and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) were then utilized, respectively, with the proposed D-PRNs, to generate two groups of transformed features corresponding to the bi-temporal remote sensing images. We next employed the Chi-square distance to compute the divergence between two groups of transformed features and, thus, obtain the Alteration Intensity Map. Finally, threshold algorithms K-means and Otsu were, respectively, applied to transform the Alteration Intensity Map into Binary Alteration Map. Experiments were conducted on two bi-temporal remote sensing image datasets, and the testing results proved that the proposed alteration detection model using D-PRNs outperformed the state-of-the-art alteration detection model.