MFMENet: multi-scale features mutual enhancement network for change detection in remote sensing images

Change detection, an important task in remote sensing image analysis, has been extensively studied in recent years. However, change detection still faces problems such as difficulty in detecting small targets and incomplete edge detection. Furthermore, pseudo changes such as seasonal changes can also lead to many false detections. In response to these challenges, we propose the Multi-scale Features Mutual Enhancement Network (MFMENet), a simple yet efficient network. MFMENet maximizes feature utilization through mutual guidance and supplementation, enhancing the detection capabilities for small targets and edges. First, we use a lightweight feature extraction network to extract features, which mitigates the information loss caused by continuous downsampling of an overly deep network structure. Then, we design a Context Adaptive Interaction Module (CAIM) to realize the complementarity of feature information at different levels. This facilitates shallow features in gaining more semantic information and deep features in acquiring more texture information, thereby enhancing the model's capability to capture more comprehensive edge features while effectively mitigating interference from pseudo changes. Finally, we introduce a Feature Aggregation Comparison Module (FACM), which uses a combination of aggregation and comparison methods to refine and enhance features. FACM can not only highlight the changed features but also retain more details, improving the model's detection ability of small targets and edge details. The full utilization of features and effective mutual enhancement of information ensure the improvement of MFMENet's performance in small target and edge detection. Extensive experiments on three publicly available datasets (LEVIR, DSIFN, and CDD) demonstrate that our approach achieves superior performance with fewer parameters compared to state-of-the-art methods in recent years. In comparison to these baseline methods, our proposed approach achieves improvements of 0.98%, 12.24%, and 2.03% in the IOU metric on the LEVIR, DSIFN, and CDD datasets, respectively, while utilizing only 1.1 M parameters.