Building Change Detection From Bitemporal Aerial Images Using Deep Learning

Abstract

Abstract. Automatic building change detection has become a topical issue owing to its wide range of applications, such as updating building maps. However, accurate building change detection remains challenging, particularly in urban areas. Thus far, there has been limited research on the use of the outdated building map (the building map before the update, referred to herein as the old-map) to increase the accuracy of building change detection. This paper presents a novel deep-learning-based method for building change detection using bitemporal aerial images containing RGB bands, bitemporal digital surface models (DSMs), and an old-map. The aerial images have two types of spatial resolutions, 12.5 cm or 16 cm, and the cell size of the DSMs is 50 cm × 50 cm. The bitemporal aerial images, the height variations calculated using the differences between the bitemporal DSMs, and the old-map were fed into a network architecture to build an automatic building change detection model. The performance of the model was quantitatively and qualitatively evaluated for an urban area that covered approximately 10 km2 and contained over 21,000 buildings. The results indicate that it can detect the building changes with optimum accuracy as compared to other methods that use inputs such as i) bitemporal aerial images only, ii) bitemporal aerial images and bitemporal DSMs, and iii) bitemporal aerial images and an old-map. The proposed method achieved recall rates of 89.3%, 88.8%, and 99.5% for new, demolished, and other buildings, respectively. The results also demonstrate that the old-map is an effective data source for increasing building change detection accuracy.