A building change detection framework with patch-pairing single-temporal supervised learning and metric guided attention mechanism

Building change detection (CD) aims to detect changes in buildings from bi-temporal pairwise images obtained at different times. Typically, a deep learning-based building CD algorithm requires bi-temporal samples with significant building changes for training. However, obtaining such bi-temporal samples is challenging because building changes have a low probability of occurrence. Fortunately, it is relatively simple to obtain single-temporal samples that include a substantial number of buildings. By using these single-temporal building samples, pseudo bi-temporal building change samples can be generated, which can effectively address the problem of limited available bi-temporal building change samples. In view of that, this study proposes a metric guided single-temporal supervised learning framework that uses single-temporal building samples for building CD. In the proposed framework, patch-pairing single-temporal supervised learning (PPSL) adopts a patch-pairing method to construct pseudo bi-temporal building change samples, while equipping the network to effectively suppresses the negative impact of geometric offset and radiation difference in real samples. To further suppress the impact of radiation difference and enhance the effectiveness of our framework, a metric-guided spatial attention module (MGSAM) is designed to minimize the intra-class feature differences between temporal samples and augment the spatial context modeling ability. The proposed method is verified by experiments on different datasets, and the results demonstrate that the proposed method can outperform the existing methods and achieve superior performance.