DEST: Difference enhanced-Swin Transformer for remote sensing change detection

Abstract

ABSTRACT Remote sensing (RS) change detection (CD) has recently achieved remarkable success thanks to convolutional neural networks (CNNs). However, due to the limited receptive fields of CNN models, existing methods are prone to generating pseudo detections or missed detections. In this letter, we propose a difference enhanced-Swin Transformer network (DEST) for accurate and robust change detection in RS images. First, we design a difference enhancement module (DEM) in the feature extraction stage to boost the feature learning of differences for dual-temporal images at each level. Second, to enlarge the receptive fields of networks and capture more changed details, we apply a Swin Transformer module to the difference features to model the global contextual information. Third, to avoid the semantic loss and simultaneously solve the problem of uneven contributions of features at different levels, we design a feature weight fusion module (FWFM) to effectively aggregate multi-level feature difference maps. Extensive experimental results on two publicly available benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed method is superior to some state-of-the-art change detection models.