Semisupervised Adaptive Ladder Network for Remote Sensing Image Change Detection

Nowadays, due to the difficult acquisition of true labels, a semisupervised neural network has shown great potential for change detection (CD) in remote sensing images. However, most of the traditional semisupervised neural network detection frameworks are complex to train and require additional structural analysis, along with a fixed structure, lacking universality. In this article, a semisupervised adaptive ladder network (SSALN) for remote sensing image CD is proposed, which enables dual-input label-incremental architecture searching with a concise and variable structure. First, SSALN is suitable for CD from two remote sensing images of any type with the characteristic of minimal label dependency and automatic network structure adjustment. The network can generate more reliable pseudolabels through continuous iterations to help limited real labels exploit implicit information, identify the most effective network, and form the ascending network structure optimization. Second, the acquisition of pseudolabels is the fusion of semisupervised and unsupervised CD approaches, which ensures the multiperspective information supplement. Multiple CD maps are fused to generate labels for the next iteration, making the predicting more reliable. Finally, both homogenous images and heterogenous images are tested with experiments. Even if the detection object is switched, it can be well adaptive and compatible without manual modification of the network. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can promote the flow of label information through structure searching and self-circulation in the ascending network optimization; thus, it has outstanding performance on tasks of remote sensing image CD.