Remote Sensing Image Change Detection Research Articles

Remote Sensing Image Change Detection Based on Deep Multi-Scale Multi-Attention Siamese Transformer Network

Change detection is a technique that can observe changes in the surface of the earth dynamically. It is one of the most significant tasks in remote sensing image processing. In the past few years, with the ability of extracting rich deep image features, the deep learning techniques have gained popularity in the field of change detection. In order to obtain obvious image change information, the attention mechanism is added in the decoder and output stage in many deep learning-based methods. Many of these approaches neglect to upgrade the ability of the encoders and the feature extractors to extract the representational features. To resolve this problem, this study proposes a deep multi-scale multi-attention siamese transformer network. A special contextual attention module combining a convolution and self-attention module is introduced into the siamese feature extractor to enhance the global representation ability. A lightly efficient channel attention block is added in the siamese feature extractor to obtain the information interaction among different channels. Furthermore, a multi-scale feature fusion module is proposed to fuse the features from different stages of the siamese feature extractor, and it can detect objects of different sizes and irregularities. To increase the accuracy of the proposed approach, the transformer module is utilized to model the long-range context in two-phase images. The experimental results on the LEVIR-CD and the CCD datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed network.

HMLNet: a hierarchical metric learning network with dual attention for change detection in high-resolution remote sensing images

ABSTRACT Change detection (CD) in high-resolution remote sensing images (RSIs) can be regarded as a binary visual recognition problem. Metric learning (ML) is a reliable method to determine pixel class attributes based on discriminative distance function between learnable image features. However, most related works learn discriminative distance functions in single-scale feature pairs, which suffer from slow convergence and poor local optima, partially due to that the loss function employs only large-scale feature samples while not interacting with the other scale features. Furthermore, more effective features are a prerequisite for improving the performance of ML-based CD. Hence, we propose a novel hierarchical metric learning network (HMLNet) with dual attention for CD in RSIs, where the key point is that hierarchical metric learning is performed in an ensemble manner to improve detection accuracy and accelerate model convergence. Specifically, based on the features extracted from the encoder-decoder backbone, we construct a feature pyramid to handle the complex details of objects at various scales in RSIs, and then perform metric learning between the paired pyramid features at the same scale. In addition, the dual-attention module is proposed to enhance the internal consistency of changed objects and effectively obtain more detailed information by acting on multi-scale pyramid features. Extensive experiments on the two public RSIs CD datasets, and the results demonstrate that the proposed HMLNet can accurately locate changed objects, which consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art CD competitors.

FERA-Net: A Building Change Detection Method for High-Resolution Remote Sensing Imagery Based on Residual Attention and High-Frequency Features

Buildings can represent the process of urban development, and building change detection can support land use management and urban planning. However, existing building change detection models are unable to extract multi-scale building features effectively or fully utilize the local and global information of the feature maps, such as building edges. These defections affect the detection accuracy and may restrict further applications of the models. In this paper, we propose the feature-enhanced residual attention network (FERA-Net) to improve the performance of the ultrahigh-resolution remote sensing image change detection task. The FERA-Net is an end-to-end network with a U-shaped encoder–decoder structure. The Siamese network is used as the encoder with an attention-guided high-frequency feature extraction module (AGFM) extracting building features and enriching detail information, and the decoder applies a feature-enhanced skip connection module (FESCM) to aggregate the enhanced multi-level differential feature maps and gradually recover the change feature maps in this structure. The FERA-Net can generate predicted building change maps by the joint supervision of building change information and building edge information. The performance of the proposed model is tested on the WHU-CD dataset and the LEVIR-CD dataset. The experimental results show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art models, with 93.51% precision and a 92.48% F1 score on the WHU-CD dataset, and 91.57% precision and an 89.58% F1 score on the LEVIR-CD dataset.

SSCFNet: A Spatial-Spectral Cross Fusion Network for Remote Sensing Change Detection

Convolutional Neural Networks(CNNs) are data-driven methods that automatically extract the rich information embedded in remote sensing images. However, most current deep learning-based remote sensing image change detection methods prioritize high-level semantic features, while not enough attention is given to low-level semantic features, resulting in the loss of edges and details of the change region. To address this problem, this paper constructs a spatial-spectral cross fusion network SSCFNet, divided into three modules: a feature extractor network module, a combined enhancement module, and a semantic cross-fusion module. A new combined enhancement strategy is proposed to construct several semantic feature blocks in the combined enhancement module. Different convolution operations are applied to the newly constructed semantic feature blocks in the semantic cross fusion module, and the obtained semantic features at various levels are cross-fused. Experiments show that the proposed SSCFNet outperforms the other six state-of-the-art methods on four publicly available remote sensing image change detection datasets.

AMCA: Attention-Guided Multiscale Context Aggregation Network for Remote Sensing Image Change Detection

Remote sensing image change detection is the key to understanding surface changes. Although the existing change detection methods have achieved good results, some structural details are missing and the detection accuracy needs to be improved. Therefore, we propose an attention-guided multi-scale context aggregation network (AMCA) for remote sensing image change detection. First, we use the fully attentional pyramid module (FAPM) to enhance the deep feature information of the original image. And we introduce the dense feature fusion module (DFFM) to fully fuse the bi-temporal features to obtain the change regions. Second, the introduction of channel-wise cross fusion transformer (CCT) and channel-wise cross attention (CCA) not only can effectively fuse channel features focusing on different semantic patterns, but also bridge the semantic gap between multi-scale features. Next, we use the transformer decoder to map the learned high-level semantic information into the pixel space to refine the original features. In addition, we use the context extraction module (CEM) to obtain the local and global associations of feature maps. Finally, the addition of attention aggregation module (AAM) can effectively combine the feature information at different scales. Extensive experiments on three public change detection datasets show that the proposed method has advantages over other methods in terms of both visual interpretation and quantitative analysis.

Adjacent-Level Feature Cross-Fusion With 3-D CNN for Remote Sensing Image Change Detection

Adjacent-Level Feature Cross-Fusion With 3-D CNN for Remote Sensing Image Change Detection

Asymmetric Cross-Attention Hierarchical Network Based on CNN and Transformer for Bitemporal Remote Sensing Images Change Detection

As an important task in the field of remote sensing image processing, remote sensing image change detection (CD) has made significant advances through the use of convolutional neural networks (CNN). The Transformer has recently been introduced into the field of CD due to its excellent global perception capabilities. Some works have attempted to combine CNN and Transformer to jointly harvest local-global features. However, these works have not paid much attention to the interaction between the features extracted by both. Also, the use of the Transformer has resulted in significant resource consumption. In this paper, we propose the Asymmetric Cross-attention Hierarchical Network (ACAHNet) by combining CNN and Transformer in a series-parallel manners. The proposed Asymmetric Multi-headed Cross Attention (AMCA) module reduces the quadratic computational complexity of the Transformer to linear, and the module enhances the interaction between features extracted from the CNN and the Transformer. Different from the early and late fusion strategies employed in previous work, the effectiveness of the mid-term fusion strategy employed by ACAHNet shows a new choice of timing for feature fusion in the CD task. Our experiments on the proposed method on three public datasets show that our network has better performance in terms of effectiveness and computational resource consumption compared to other comparative methods.

TD-SSCD: A Novel Network by Fusing Temporal and Differential Information for Self-Supervised Remote Sensing Image Change Detection

TD-SSCD: A Novel Network by Fusing Temporal and Differential Information for Self-Supervised Remote Sensing Image Change Detection

MANet: An Efficient Multidimensional Attention-Aggregated Network for Remote Sensing Image Change Detection

MANet: An Efficient Multidimensional Attention-Aggregated Network for Remote Sensing Image Change Detection

LHDACT: Lightweight Hybrid Dual Attention CNN and Transformer Network for Remote Sensing Image Change Detection

LHDACT: Lightweight Hybrid Dual Attention CNN and Transformer Network for Remote Sensing Image Change Detection

Continuous Cross-Resolution Remote Sensing Image Change Detection

Continuous Cross-Resolution Remote Sensing Image Change Detection

Ultralightweight Spatial–Spectral Feature Cooperation Network for Change Detection in Remote Sensing Images

Deep convolutional neural networks have achieved much success in remote sensing image change detection (CD) but still suffer from two main problems. First, existing multi-scale feature fusion methods often employ redundant feature extraction and fusion strategies, which often leads to high computational costs and memory usage. Second, the regular attention mechanism in CD is difficult to model spatial-spectral features and generate 3D attention weights at the same time, ignoring the cooperation between spatial features and spectral features. To address the above issues, an efficient ultra-lightweight spatial-spectral feature cooperation network (USSFC-Net) is proposed for CD in this paper. The proposed USSFC-Net has two main advantages. First, a multi-scale decoupled convolution (MSDConv) is designed, which is clearly different from the popular atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) module and its variants since it can flexibly capture the multi-scale features of changed objects by using cyclic multi-scale convolution. Meanwhile, the design of MSDConv can greatly reduce the number of parameters and computational redundancy. Second, an efficient spatial-spectral feature cooperation strategy (SSFC) is introduced to obtain richer features. The SSFC differs from existing 2D attention mechanisms since it learns 3D spatial-spectral attention weights without adding any parameters. The experiments on three datasets for remote sensing image CD demonstrate that the proposed USSFC-Net achieves better CD accuracy than most convolutional neural networks-based methods and requires lower computational costs and fewer parameters, even it is superior to some Transformer-based methods. The code is available at https://github.com/SUST-reynole/USSFC-Net.

SDCDNet: A Semi-Dual Change Detection Network Framework With Super-Weak Label for Remote Sensing Image

Most current change detection methods require a large amount of labeled data to train huge parameters. To break this limitation, this paper proposes a novel semi-supervised learning framework for remote sensing change detection, named a semi-dual change detection network (SDCDNet). The SDCDNet consists of a dual shared network and dual branching networks. The dual shared network is designed to exploit the full potential of the data, and the dual branching network is proposed to differentiate the kinds of annotated data and eliminate the disturbance between different types of data. In addition, the adaptive weighting module (AWM) enhances the features of weak branching, and the mask constraint module (MCM) is proposed to increase the ability of the network to extract foreground features. To solve the complex problem of data labeling, a patch-based weak label construction method is proposed to build super-weak labels. Experiments show that the proposed SDCDNet achieves excellent results on two remote sensing image change detection datasets.

TCIANet: Transformer-Based Context Information Aggregation Network for Remote Sensing Image Change Detection

Change detection based on remote sensing data is an important method to detect the earth surface changes. With the development of deep learning, convolutional neural networks have excelled in the field of change detection. However, the existing neural network models are susceptible to external factors in the change detection process, leading to pseudo change and missed detection in the detection results. In order to better achieve the change detection effect and improve the ability to discriminate pseudo-change, this paper proposes a new method, namely, transformer-based context information aggregation network (TCIANet) for remote sensing image change detection. First, we use a filter-based visual tokenizer (FVT) to segment each temporal feature map into multiple visual semantic tokens. Second, the addition of the progressive sampling vision transformer (PS-ViT) not only effectively excludes the interference of irrelevant changes, but also uses the transformer encoder to obtain compact spatio-temporal context information in the token set. Then, the tokens containing rich semantic information are fed into the pixel space and the transformer decoder is used to acquire pixel-level features. In addition, we use the feature fusion module (FFM) to fuse low-level semantic feature information to complete the extraction of coarse contour information of the changed region. Then the semantic relationships between object regions and contours are captured by contour-graph reasoning module (CGRM) to obtain feature maps with complete edge information. Finally, the prediction model is used to discriminate the change of feature information and generate the final change map. Numerous experimental results show that our method has more obvious advantages in visual effect and quantitative evaluation than other methods.

ECFNet: A Siamese Network With Fewer FPs and Fewer FNs for Change Detection of Remote-Sensing Images

High-resolution remote-sensing image change detection plays an important role in areas such as land and resources investigation, natural disaster prediction, and military strategy research. Current change detection methods often focus on extracting more discriminative features, while ignoring the information loss and imbalance problems in the process of feature fusion, which results in weakness in small change objects and edge pixels of change objects. In this letter, a simple but efficient network architecture, extraction, comparison and fusion network (ECFNet), for change detection in remote-sensing images is proposed. By constraining the number of feature channels in the fusion process by the feature comparison module (FCM), ECFNet can better utilize the fine-grained information in the multiscale feature map for result prediction, which not only improves the detection performance of small objects, but also reduces the false detection around the edge pixels of change objects. Experiments on the deeply supervised image fusion network for change detection (DSIFN-CD) test set show that ECFNet achieves state-of-the-art results with a small amount of computation.

Research on Optimization of Processing Parcels of New Bare Land Based on Remote Sensing Image Change Detection

To meet the demands of natural resource monitoring, land development supervision, and other applications for high-precision and high-frequency information extraction from constructed land change, this paper focused on automatic feature extraction and data processing optimization methods for newly constructed bare land based on remote sensing images. A generalized deep convolutional neural network change detection model framework integrating multi-scale information was developed for the automatic extraction of change information. To resolve the problems in the automatic extraction of new bare land parcels, such as mis-extractions and parcel fragmentation, a proximity evaluation model that integrates the confidence-based semantic distance and spatial distance between parcels and their overlapping area is proposed to perform parcel aggregation. Additionally, we propose a complete set of optimized processing techniques from pixel pre-processing to vector post-processing. The results demonstrated that the aggregation method developed in this study is more targeted and effective than ArcGIS for the automatically extracted land change parcels. Additionally, compared with the initial parcels, the total number of optimized parcels decreased by more than 50% and the false detection rate decreased by approximately 30%. These results indicate that this method can markedly reduce the overall data volume and false detection rate of automatically extracted parcels through post-processing under certain conditions of the model and samples and provide technical support for applying the results of automatic feature extraction in engineering practices.

A Deeply Supervised Attentive High-Resolution Network for Change Detection in Remote Sensing Images

Change detection (CD) is a crucial task in remote sensing (RS) to distinguish surface changes from bitemporal images. Recently, deep learning (DL) based methods have achieved remarkable success for CD. However, the existing methods lack robustness to various kinds of changes in RS images, which suffered from problems of feature misalignment and inefficient supervision. In this paper, a deeply supervised attentive high-resolution network (DSAHRNet) is proposed for remote sensing image change detection. First, we design a spatial-channel attention module to decode change information from bitemporal features. The attention module is able to model spatial-wise and channel-wise contexts. Second, to reduce feature misalignment, the extracted features are refined by stacked convolutional blocks in parallel. Finally, a novel deeply supervised module is introduced to generate more discriminative features. Extensive experimental results on three challenging benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed DSAHRNet outperforms other state-of-the-art methods, and achieves a great trade-off between performance and complexity.

AFSNet: attention-guided full-scale feature aggregation network for high-resolution remote sensing image change detection

ABSTRACT Using change detection technique precisely analyzes remote sensing images, it has a broad range of applications in resource surveys, surveillance systems, and map updating. In recent years, deep learning-based methods have become a focus area owing to their excellent feature extraction and representation ability. The fusion of multi-scale features is the key to improving change detection performance in fully convolutional network-based structural methods, primarily based on an architecture with skip connections or nested and dense skip connections. However, these methods only fuse features on the same scale and lack sufficient information from multiple scales to generate appropriate results. Traditional feature fusion with redundant and unsupervised information leads to poor model fitting. To solve these problems, we proposed a novel attention-guided full-scale feature aggregation network (AFSNet). The proposed method used a Siamese structure as the backbone network to extract features, which were then aggregated using full-scale skip connections, and an attention mechanism to avoid feature redundancy. Finally, to obtain a highly accurate final change map, a multiple side-outputs fusion strategy was used to fuse the change maps at different scales. To check the reliability of AFSNet, we tested it on two public datasets, the LEVIR-CD and SVCD datasets. The F1-Score/IoU scores improved by 0.57%/0.95% and 1.14%/2.07% in the two datasets, respectively, compared to those obtained using the methods that achieved suboptimal values. The results showed that AFSNet outperforms other mainstream methods while maintaining a good balance between computational costs and model parameters.

SUMLP: A Siamese U-shaped MLP-based network for change detection

Remote sensing image change detection (CD) technology is an important means to understand the changes of the earth surface. In recent years, many excellent CD methods based on convolutional neural networks (CNN) have been proposed. Although these methods have achieved good results, CD is still a very challenging task. Recently, many visual algorithms based on multi-layer perceptron (MLP) have been proposed and achieved similar or even better results than CNN-based algorithms in many visual fields. Inspired by the success of these MLP-based algorithms, in this paper we propose a siamese U-shaped MLP-based CD network named SUMLP. First, SUMLP uses CycleMLP block as the basic unit of the network and combines the characteristics of the CD task to construct a MLP-based CD network with siamese U-shaped structure. Secondly, to better optimize the CD network, we design a new loss function, weighted cosine cross entropy (WCCE) loss. WCCE loss has two advantages: 1. WCCE loss gives different weights to the changed samples and the unchanged samples, which can cope with the data imbalance problem in the CD task; 2. WCCE loss uses cosine margin to increase the inter class distance and the intra class compactness, so as to better distinguish the changed samples from the unchanged samples. For comprehensively verifying the validity of our proposed method, we carried out many experiments on three public CD datasets: LEVIR-CD dataset, CDD dataset and WHU-CD dataset. On these datasets, SUMLP’s F1−score are at least 0.33%, 1.41% and 3.56% higher than the other relevant CD methods respectively.

MFATNet: Multi-Scale Feature Aggregation via Transformer for Remote Sensing Image Change Detection

In recent years, with the extensive application of deep learning in images, the task of remote sensing image change detection has witnessed a significant improvement. Several excellent methods based on Convolutional Neural Networks and emerging transformer-based methods have achieved impressive accuracy. However, Convolutional Neural Network-based approaches have difficulties in capturing long-range dependencies because of their natural limitations in effective receptive field acquisition unless deeper networks are employed, introducing other drawbacks such as an increased number of parameters and loss of shallow information. The transformer-based methods can effectively learn the relationship between different regions, but the computation is inefficient. Thus, in this paper, a multi-scale feature aggregation via transformer (MFATNet) is proposed for remote sensing image change detection. To obtain a more accurate change map after learning the intra-relationships of feature maps at different scales through the transformer, MFATNet aggregates the multi-scale features. Moreover, the Spatial Semantic Tokenizer (SST) is introduced to obtain refined semantic tokens before feeding into the transformer structure to make it focused on learning more crucial pixel relationships. To fuse low-level features (more fine-grained localization information) and high-level features (more accurate semantic information), and to alleviate the localization and semantic gap between high and low features, the Intra- and Inter-class Channel Attention Module (IICAM) are integrated to further determine more convincing change maps. Extensive experiments are conducted on LEVIR-CD, WHU-CD, and DSIFN-CD datasets. Intersection over union (IoU) of 82.42 and F1 score of 90.36, intersection over union (IoU) of 79.08 and F1 score of 88.31, intersection over union (IoU) of 77.98 and F1 score of 87.62, respectively, are achieved. The experimental results achieved promising performance compared to certain previous state-of-the-art change detection methods.