Acta Geodaetica et Cartographica Sinica ›› 2024, Vol. 53 ›› Issue (12): 2244-2253.doi: 10.11947/j.AGCS.2024.20230454

• Intelligent Image Processing • Previous Articles    

A high-resolution remote sensing images change detection method via the integration of dense connections and self-attention mechanisms

Shiyan PANG1(), Jingjing HAO1, Zhiqi ZUO2, Jingjing LAN1, Xiangyun HU3,4()   

  1. 1.Faculty of Artificial Intelligence in Education, Central China Normal University, Wuhan 430079, China
    2.College of Informatics, Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan 430070, China
    3.School of Remote Sensing and Information Engineering, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430079, China
    4.Hubei Luojia Laboratory, Wuhan 430079, China
  • Received:2023-10-10 Published:2025-01-06
  • Contact: Xiangyun HU E-mail:pangsy@ccnu.edu.cn;huxy@whu.edu.cn
  • About author:PANG Shiyan (1987—), female, PhD, associate professor, majors in remote sensing image interpretation and deep learning applications. E-mail: pangsy@ccnu.edu.cn
  • Supported by:
    Humanities and Social Science Research Project Funded by the Ministry of Education(22YJC880058);The Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities(CCNU22QN019)

Abstract:

Remote sensing image change detection is an important task in remote sensing image analysis, which is widely used in urban dynamic monitoring, geographic information update, natural disaster monitoring, illegal building investigation, military target strike effect analysis, and land and resources survey. As a pixel-level prediction task, the current methods of change detection have two prominent problems: one is the computational efficiency of self-attention between arbitrary pixel pairs is low, and the long context information in remote sensing images is insufficiently utilized; the other is that the current methods focus on the extraction of deep change image features while shallow information containing high-resolution and fine-grained features are ignored. To address the first problem, Transformer is used to perform context modeling on the extracted bitemporal image features to improve the quality of the deepest change features. To take into account the efficiency of the Transformer, the proposed method converts the images into sparse tokens, thereby significantly reducing the number of tokens of the Transformer. For the second problem, the proposed method uses dense skip connections to retain high resolution in shallow change features. Three publicly available datasets were used for experiments. Extensive experiments show that compared with the state-of-the-art change detection methods, the IoU metric of the proposed method reached 85.44%, 84.15% and 94.61%, respectively, which is better than other comparison methods.

Key words: remote sensing images, change detection, Transformer, dense connections, multi-scale feature fusion

CLC Number: