S2Looking: A Satellite Side-Looking Dataset for Building Change Detection

Collecting large-scale annotated satellite imagery datasets is essential for deep-learning-based global building change surveillance. In particular, the scroll imaging mode of optical satellites enables larger observation ranges and shorter revisit periods, facilitating efficient global surveillance. However, the images in recent satellite change detection datasets are mainly captured at near-nadir viewing angles. In this paper, we introduce S2Looking, a building change detection dataset that contains large-scale side-looking satellite images captured at varying off-nadir angles. Our S2Looking dataset consists of 5000 registered bitemporal image pairs (size of 1024*1024, 0.5 ~ 0.8 m/pixel) of rural areas throughout the world and more than 65,920 annotated change instances. We provide two label maps to separately indicate the newly built and demolished building regions for each sample in the dataset. We establish a benchmark task based on this dataset, i.e., identifying the pixel-level building changes in the bi-temporal images. We test several state-of-the-art methods on both the S2Looking dataset and the (near-nadir) LEVIR-CD+ dataset. The experimental results show that recent change detection methods exhibit much poorer performance on the S2Looking than on LEVIR-CD+. The proposed S2Looking dataset presents three main challenges: 1) large viewing angle changes, 2) large illumination variances and 3) various complex scene characteristics encountered in rural areas. Our proposed dataset may promote the development of algorithms for satellite image change detection and registration under conditions of large off-nadir angles. The dataset is available at https://github.com/AnonymousForACMMM/.