Special Issue: Intelligent Processing and Analysis of Aerospace Remote Sensing Images

Pre-disaster footprint-guilded building damage change detection in spaceborne remote sensing imagery

  • Jiepan LI ,
  • Wei HE ,
  • Minghao TANG ,
  • Jin XIONG
Expand
  • 1.State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying,Mapping and Remote Sensing,Wuhan University,Wuhan 430072,China
    2.Zhejiang Academy of Emergency Management Science and Technology,Hangzhou 310012,China
    3.Hanjiang River Basin Governance and Protection Center,Changjiang Water Resources Commission,Wuhan 430014,China
E-mail: weihe@whu.edu.cn

Received date: 2025-09-28

  Revised date: 2025-11-06

  Accepted date: 2025-11-25

  Online published: 2025-12-08

Abstract

As the primary carriers of population and economic activities, buildings are highly vulnerable to disasters, and their damage status directly affects emergency response and post-disaster reconstruction. Therefore, rapid and accurate acquisition of building damage information has become a critical requirement in disaster management. To address the challenges of geometric misalignment, background interference, and feature alignment difficulties in multi-temporal and cross-modal remote sensing imagery, we propose a Pre-Disaster Footprint-guided change-aware damage detection Network (PDF-Net). Specifically, the framework first employs a twin pyramid vision transformer to extract multi-level features from pre-and post-disaster imagery and generates pre-disaster building masks to introduce guidance information. Subsequently, a change-aware gated attention module is designed to enhance differential representation of low-level detail features, highlighting local changes, while a grouped cross-temporal attention mechanism with overlapped windows is introduced to explicitly align high-level semantic features, thereby reinforcing the structural change representation of buildings. Finally, fine-grained damage detection is achieved through cross-level feature fusion. Experiments conducted on the xBD dataset (pre-disaster optical-post-disaster optical) and the Bright dataset (pre-disaster optical-post-disaster SAR) demonstrate that the proposed method achieves significant improvements in both intra-modal and cross-modal tasks. Specifically, B-PriorNet surpasses the current state-of-the-art methods by 0.58% in mean Intersection-over-Union (mIoU) on the xBD dataset and by 1.97% on the Bright dataset, showing stronger robustness and generalization ability in cross-modal detection scenarios. These results validate the effectiveness and practical value of the proposed framework in complex disaster environments.

Cite this article

Jiepan LI , Wei HE , Minghao TANG , Jin XIONG . Pre-disaster footprint-guilded building damage change detection in spaceborne remote sensing imagery[J]. ACTA AERONAUTICAET ASTRONAUTICA SINICA, 2026 , 47(10) : 532845 -532845 . DOI: 10.7527/S1000-6893.2025.32845

References

[1] 王丝丝, 刘志春, 张景, 等. 灾害应急响应中多源遥感数据国际共享服务研究[J]. 遥感技术与应用202439(1): 198-208.
  WANG S S, LIU Z C, ZHANG J, et al. Research on international sharing service of multi-source remote sensing data in disaster emergency response[J]. Remote Sensing Technology and Application202439(1): 198-208 (in Chinese).
[2] WANG H F, HE W, LI Z H, et al. Cross-scenario damaged building extraction network: Methodology, application, and efficiency using single-temporal HRRS imagery[J]. ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing2025228: 228-248.
[3] 赵金玲, 黄健, 梁梓君, 等. 基于BDANet的地震灾害建筑物损毁评估[J]. 自然资源遥感202436(4): 193-200.
  ZHAO J L, HUANG J, LIANG Z J, et al. BDANet-based assessment of building damage from earthquake disasters[J]. Remote Sensing for Natural Resources202436(4): 193-200 (in Chinese).
[4] 魏麟. 基于高分辨率遥感影像的震灾建筑物损毁检测[J]. 地理空间信息202220(3): 68-71, 116.
  WEI L. Building earthquake damage detection based on high-resolution remote sensing image[J]. Geospatial Information202220(3): 68-71, 116 (in Chinese).
[5] 张继贤, 顾海燕, 倪欢, 等. 遥感智能变化检测的深度学习方法: 演变与发展趋势[J]. 测绘学报202554(8): 1347-1370.
  ZHANG J X, GU H Y, NI H, et al. Deep learning methods for remote sensing intelligent change detection: Evolution and development[J]. Acta Geodaetica et Cartographica Sinica202554(8): 1347-1370 (in Chinese).
[6] WANG H F, HE W, LI Z H, et al. Cross-scenario damaged building extraction network: Methodology, application, and efficiency using single-temporal HRRS imagery[J]. ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing2025228: 228-248.
[7] 程塨, 王光兴, 韩军伟. 深度学习遥感变化检测综述: 典型算法及发展趋势[J]. 遥感学报202529(6): 1587-1597.
  CHENG G, WANG G X, HAN J W. Deep learning for change detection in remote sensing: A review and new outlooks[J]. National Remote Sensing Bulletin202529(6): 1587-1597 (in Chinese).
[8] QUARMBY N A, CUSHNIE J L. Monitoring urban land cover changes at the urban fringe from SPOT HRV imagery in south-east England[J]. International Journal of Remote Sensing198910(6): 953-963.
[9] RIGNOT E J M, VAN ZYL J J. Change detection techniques for ERS-1 SAR data[J]. IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing199331(4): 896-906.
[10] NIELSEN A A, CANTY M J. Kernel principal component analysis for change detection[J]. Image and Signal Processing for Remote Sensing XIV20087109: 71090T.
[11] NIELSEN A A, CONRADSEN K, SIMPSON J J. Multivariate alteration detection (MAD) and MAF postprocessing in multispectral, bitemporal image data: New approaches to change detection studies[J]. Remote Sensing of Environment199864(1): 1-19.
[12] GRAESSER J, RAMANKUTTY N. Detection of cropland field parcels from Landsat imagery[J]. Remote Sensing of Environment2017201: 165-180.
[13] 高仁强, 陈亮雄, 杨静学, 等. 一种高分影像随机森林变化检测方法[J]. 测绘科学202045(11): 130-138.
  GAO R Q, CHEN L X, YANG J X, et al. A method of random forest change detection based on high resolution image[J]. Science of Surveying and Mapping202045(11): 130-138 (in Chinese).
[14] 付青, 罗文浪, 吕敬祥. 基于AlexNet和支持向量机相结合的卫星遥感影像土地利用变化检测[J]. 激光与光电子学进展202057(17): 172802.
  FU Q, LUO W L, Lü J X. Land utilization change detection of satellite remote sensing image based on AlexNet and support vector machine[J]. Laser & Optoelectronics Progress202057(17): 172802 (in Chinese).
[15] KRIZHEVSKY A, SUTSKEVER I, HINTON G E. ImageNet classification with deep convolutional neural networks[J]. Communications of the ACM201760(6): 84-90.
[16] CHEN P, ZHANG B, HONG D F, et al. FCCDN: Feature constraint network for VHR image change detection[J]. ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing2022187: 101-119.
[17] SHELHAMER E, LONG J, DARRELL T. Fully convolutional networks for semantic segmentation[C]∥IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. Piscataway: IEEE Press, 2016: 640-651.
[18] HE K, ZHANG X, REN S, et al. Deep residual learning for image recognition[C]∥2016 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. Piscataway: IEEE Press, 2016: 770-778.
[19] LIU Z, LIN Y T, CAO Y, et al. Swin transformer: Hierarchical vision transformer using shifted windows[C]∥2021 IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV). Piscataway: IEEE Press, 2022: 9992-10002.
[20] WANG W H, XIE E Z, LI X, et al. Pyramid vision transformer: A versatile backbone for dense prediction without convolutions[C]∥2021 IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV). Piscataway: IEEE Press, 2022: 548-558.
[21] ZHENG Z, ZHONG Y F, WANG J J, et al. Building damage assessment for rapid disaster response with a deep object-based semantic change detection framework: From natural disasters to man-made disasters[J]. Remote Sensing of Environment2021265: 112636.
[22] QING Y Z, MING D P, WEN Q, et al. Operational earthquake-induced building damage assessment using CNN-based direct remote sensing change detection on superpixel level[J]. International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation2022112: 102899.
[23] 李钊, 许涛, 田西兰. 基于混合残差和全局注意力的遥感图像变化检测[J]. 电讯技术202565(10): 1551-1560.
  LI Z, XU T, TIAN X L. Change detection of remote sensing image based on mix residual and global attention[J]. Telecommunication Engineering202565(10): 1551-1560 (in Chinese).
[24] SHU Q D, PAN J, ZHANG Z E, et al. DPCC-Net: Dual-perspective change contextual network for change detection in high-resolution remote sensing images[J]. International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation2022112: 102940.
[25] CHEN H, SONG J, HAN C X, et al. ChangeMamba: Remote sensing change detection with spatiotemporal state space model[J]. IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing202462: 4409720.
[26] ZHANG Z Q, BAO L Y, XIANG S, et al. B2CNet: A progressive change boundary-to-center refinement network for multitemporal remote sensing images change detection[J]. IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing202417: 11322-11338.
[27] LIU T Y, LI J P, CAO W N, et al. MLCNet: Multitask level-specific constraint network for building change detection[J]. IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing202417: 11823-11838.
[28] XU C, YU H N, MEI L Y, et al. Rethinking building change detection: Dual-frequency learnable visual encoder with multiscale integration network[J]. IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing202417: 6174-6188.
[29] LI J P, HE W, LI Z H, et al. Overcoming the uncertainty challenges in detecting building changes from remote sensing images[J]. ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing2025220: 1-17.
[30] LIN T Y, DOLLáR P, GIRSHICK R, et al. Feature pyramid networks for object detection[C]∥2017 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR). Piscataway: IEEE Press, 2017: 936-944.
[31] GUPTA R, HOSFELT R, SAJEEV S, et al. xBD: A dataset for assessing building damage from satellite imagery[DB/OL]. arXiv preprint1911.09296, 2019.
[32] CHEN H, SONG J, DIETRICH O, et al. Bright: A globally distributed multimodal building damage assessment dataset with very-high-resolution for all-weather disaster response[J]. Earth System Science Data202517(11): 6217-6253.
[33] CAYE DAUDT R, LE SAUX B, BOULCH A. Fully convolutional Siamese networks for change detection[C]∥2018 25th IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP). Piscataway: IEEE Press, 2018: 4063-4067.
[34] CHEN T, LU Z Y, YANG Y, et al. A Siamese network based U-Net for change detection in high resolution remote sensing images[J]. IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing202215: 2357-2369.
[35] CHEN H, QI Z P, SHI Z W. Remote sensing image change detection with transformers[J]. IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing202260: 5607514.
[36] BANDARA W G C, PATEL V M. A transformer-based Siamese network for change detection[C]∥IGARSS 2022-2022 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium. Piscataway: IEEE Press, 2022: 207-210.
[37] LIN M H, YANG G Y, ZHANG H Y. Transition is a process: Pair-to-video change detection networks for very high resolution remote sensing images[J]. IEEE Transactions on Image Processing202332: 57-71.
[38] HAN C X, WU C, GUO H N, et al. HANet: A hierarchical attention network for change detection with bitemporal very-high-resolution remote sensing images[J]. IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing202316: 3867-3878.
[39] HAN C X, WU C, GUO H N, et al. Change guiding network: Incorporating change prior to guide change detection in remote sensing imagery[J]. IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing202316: 8395-8407.
[40] LI K Y, CAO X Y, MENG D Y. A new learning paradigm for foundation model-based remote-sensing change detection[J]. IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing202462: 5610112.
[41] PAN J, BAI Y C, SHU Q D, et al. M-Swin: Transformer-based multiscale feature fusion change detection network within cropland for remote sensing images[J]. IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing202462: 4702716.
Outlines

/