High-resolution mapping of land disturbance and reclamation is important for assessing the cumulative environmental effects of oil/gas production. The growing availability of high-resolution satellite imagery, combined with recent advances in deep learning, offers a desirable solution for detecting land surface changes on disturbed land. In this study, we constructed the Alberta oil/gas wells semantic change detection (SCD) data set in Alberta, Canada, based on high-resolution satellite imagery from WorldView-2 and SPOT-6. The data set consists of 328 pairs of bitemporal images (512 × 512 pixels at 1.5-m resolution), along with corresponding semantic change maps, binary change maps, and land cover maps. In addition, we proposed a constrained dual-head convolutional neural network (CNN) framework that jointly learns semantic change and binary change tasks. Specifically, two segmentation heads are designed—one for semantic changes and one for binary changes—and are explicitly connected through a cosine similarity loss that enforces consistency between the two tasks. Taking High-Resolution Net (HRNet)-v2 as the backbone, our model was pretrained on the large-scale SEmantic Change detectiON Data Set (SECOND) and fine-tuned on our developed data set. Comparative experiments with BiSRNet, HGINet, and SCanNet demonstrate that our approach achieves superior performance, with the highest mean intersection over union (mIoU) (79.47%) and separated Kappa (SeK) (28.40%) after fine-tuning. Incorporating land cover maps as additional supervision further boosts results, with our approach reaching an mIoU of 80.05% and a SeK of 29.71%. These findings highlight the effectiveness of the proposed constrained dual-head CNN architecture and the benefit of leveraging land cover information for advancing SCD in remote sensing.
Xu et al. (Wed,) studied this question.