Visual attention-based siamese CNN with SoftmaxFocal loss for laser-induced damage change detection of optical elements.

• A novel deep learning model for laser-induced damage change detection is proposed. • The proposed model combines siamese CNN with visual attention mechanism. • A novel SoftmaxFocal loss is put forward to train the network. • Our model outperforms four different methods overall on three real datasets. With high-energy laser irradiating, the laser-induced damages may occur in the surfaces of optical elements in laser facilities. As the laser-induced damage changes can badly affect regular and healthy operation of laser facilities, it is essential to effectively detect real damage changes while suppressing meaningless and spurious changes in captured optical images. In order to achieve high-precision laser-induced damage change detection, this paper presents a novel deep learning model which exploits visual attention-based siamese convolutional neural network with SoftmaxFocal loss and significantly improves the performance of damage change detection. In the proposed model, an end-to-end classification network is designed and trained which fuses the spatial-channel domain collaborative attention modules into siamese convolutional neural network thus achieving more efficient feature extraction and representation. For the purpose of addressing the unbalanced distribution of hard and easy samples, a novel loss function which is termed as SoftmaxFocal loss is put forward to train the proposed network. The SoftmaxFocal loss creatively introduces an additive focusing term into original softmax loss which greatly enhances the online hard sample mining ability of the proposed model. Experiments conducted on three real datasets demonstrate the validity and superiority of the proposed model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]