Patch-level unsupervised planetary change detection

Abstract

Change detection (CD) is critical for analyzing data collected by planetary exploration missions, e.g., for identification of new impact craters. However, CD is still a relatively new topic in the context of planetary exploration. Sheer variation of planetary data makes CD much more challenging than in the case of Earth observation (EO). Unlike CD for EO, patch-level decision is preferred in planetary exploration as it is difficult to obtain perfect pixelwise alignment/co-registration between the bi-temporal planetary images. Lack of labeled bi-temporal data impedes supervised CD. To overcome these challenges, we propose an unsupervised CD method that exploits a pre-trained feature extractor to obtain bi-temporal deep features that are further processed using global max-pooling to obtain patch-level feature description. Bi-temporal patch-level features are further analyzed based on difference to determine whether a patch is changed. Additionally, a self-supervised method is proposed to estimate the decision boundary between the changed and unchanged patches. Experimental results on three planetary CD datasets from two different planetary bodies (Mars and Moon) demonstrate that the proposed method often outperforms supervised planetary CD methods. Code is available at https://gitlab.lrz.de/ai4eo/cd/-/tree/main/planetaryCDUnsup.