Advancing Self-Supervised Learning for Building Change Detection and Damage Assessment: Unified Denoising Autoencoder and Contrastive Learning Framework

• Published in: Remote sensing (Basel, Switzerland) Vol. 17; no. 15; p. 2717
• Main Authors: Yang, Songxi, Peng, Bo, Sui, Tang, Wu, Meiliu, Huang, Qunying
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 01.08.2025
• Subjects: Accuracy; Change detection; Classification; contrastive learning; Damage assessment; Damage detection; Datasets; Deep learning; Disaster management; Disasters; Feature extraction; Learning; Machine learning; Noise reduction; Performance evaluation; Remote sensing; Representations; Segmentation; Self-supervised learning; Semantics; Urban development; Urban environments; vision transformer
• DOI: 10.3390/rs17152717
• ISSN: 2072-4292

Building change detection and building damage assessment are two essential tasks in post-disaster analysis. Building change detection focuses on identifying changed building areas between bi-temporal images, while building damage assessment involves segmenting all buildings and classifying their damage severity. These tasks play a critical role in disaster response and urban development monitoring. Although supervised learning has significantly advanced building change detection and damage assessment, its reliance on large labeled datasets remains a major limitation. In contrast, self-supervised learning enables the extraction of meaningful data representations without explicit training labels. To address this challenge, we propose a self-supervised learning approach that unifies denoising autoencoders and contrastive learning, enabling effective data representation for building change detection and damage assessment. The proposed architecture integrates a dual denoising autoencoder with a Vision Transformer backbone and contrastive learning strategy, complemented by a Feature Pyramid Network-ResNet dual decoder and an Edge Guidance Module. This design enhances multi-scale feature extraction and enables edge-aware segmentation for accurate predictions. Extensive experiments were conducted on five public datasets, including xBD, LEVIR, LEVIR+, SYSU, and WHU, to evaluate the performance and generalization capabilities of the model. The results demonstrate that the proposed Denoising AutoEncoder-enhanced Dual-Fusion Network (DAEDFN) approach achieves competitive performance compared with fully supervised methods. On the xBD dataset, the largest dataset for building damage assessment, our proposed method achieves an F1 score of 0.892 for building segmentation, outperforming state-of-the-art methods. For building damage severity classification, the model achieves an F1 score of 0.632. On the building change detection datasets, the proposed method achieves F1 scores of 0.837 (LEVIR), 0.817 (LEVIR+), 0.768 (SYSU), and 0.876 (WHU), demonstrating model generalization across diverse scenarios. Despite these promising results, challenges remain in complex urban environments, small-scale changes, and fine-grained boundary detection. These findings highlight the potential of self-supervised learning in building change detection and damage assessment tasks.