  Change detection is one of the central problems in earth observation and was
extensively investigated over recent decades. In this paper, we propose a novel
recurrent convolutional neural network (ReCNN) architecture, which is trained
to learn a joint spectral-spatial-temporal feature representation in a unified
framework for change detection in multispectral images. To this end, we bring
together a convolutional neural network (CNN) and a recurrent neural network
(RNN) into one end-to-end network. The former is able to generate rich
spectral-spatial feature representations, while the latter effectively analyzes
temporal dependency in bi-temporal images. In comparison with previous
approaches to change detection, the proposed network architecture possesses
three distinctive properties: 1) It is end-to-end trainable, in contrast to
most existing methods whose components are separately trained or computed; 2)
it naturally harnesses spatial information that has been proven to be
beneficial to change detection task; 3) it is capable of adaptively learning
the temporal dependency between multitemporal images, unlike most of algorithms
that use fairly simple operation like image differencing or stacking. As far as
we know, this is the first time that a recurrent convolutional network
architecture has been proposed for multitemporal remote sensing image analysis.
The proposed network is validated on real multispectral data sets. Both visual
and quantitative analysis of experimental results demonstrates competitive
performance in the proposed mode.
