SAR Image Change Detection Method Based on Neural-CRF Structure

Abstract

There are two problems in SAR image change detection when using difference images (DIs), i.e., 1) the subtraction operation results in serious loss of semantic information in DIs; and 2) the boundary of DI is uncertain. We propose a change detection method based on Neural-CRF structure. Firstly, Transformer-UNet (TR-UNet) is designed to provide the unary potential for CRF. The TR-Attention module improves the semantic expression ability of UNet by introducing the multi-head attention mechanism of TR. Secondly, a cascade CRF as Recurrent Neural Network, named as C-CRF-RNN, is proposed to update the unary potential and pairwise potential simultaneously. This improves the ability of CRF-RNN to refine pixel-level label prediction. Experiments show that the proposed method consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on two benchmarks including berne data and ottawa data.