Fusing Multi-modal Data for Supervised Change Detection

Abstract

With the rapid development of remote sensing technology in the last decade, different modalities of remote sensing data recorded via a variety of sensors are now easily accessible. Different sensors often provide complementary information and thus a more detailed and accurate Earth observation is possible by integrating their joint information. While change detection methods have been traditionally proposed for homogeneous data, combining multi-sensor multi-temporal data with different characteristics and resolution may provide a more robust interpretation of spatio-temporal evolution. However, integration of multi-temporal information from disparate sensory sources is challenging. Moreover, research in this direction is often hindered by a lack of available multi-modal data sets. To resolve these current shortcomings we curate a novel data set for multi-modal change detection. We further propose a novel Siamese architecture for fusion of SAR and optical observations for multi-modal change detection, which underlines the value of our newly gathered data. An experimental validation on the aforementioned data set demonstrates the potentials of the proposed model, which outperforms common mono-modal methods compared against.