Multi-Scale Feature Interaction Network for Remote Sensing Change Detection

Change detection (CD) is an important remote sensing (RS) data analysis technology. Existing remote sensing change detection (RS-CD) technologies cannot fully consider situations where pixels between bitemporal images do not correspond well on a one-to-one basis due to factors such as seasonal changes and lighting conditions. Existing networks construct two identical feature extraction branches through convolution, which share weights. The two branches work independently and do not merge until the feature mapping is sent to the decoder head. This results in a lack of feature information interaction between the two images. So, directing attention to the change area is of research interest. In complex backgrounds, the loss of edge details is very important. Therefore, this paper proposes a new CD algorithm that extracts multi-scale feature information through the backbone network in the coding stage. According to the task characteristics of CD, two submodules (the Feature Interaction Module and Detail Feature Guidance Module) are designed to make the feature information between the bitemporal RS images fully interact. Thus, the edge details are restored to the greatest extent while fully paying attention to the change areas. Finally, in the decoding stage, the feature information of different levels is fully used for fusion and decoding operations. We build a new CD dataset to further verify and test the model’s performance. The generalization and robustness of the model are further verified by using two open datasets. However, due to the relatively simple construction of the model, it cannot handle the task of multi-classification CD well. Therefore, further research on multi-classification CD algorithms is recommended. Moreover, due to the high production cost of CD datasets and the difficulty in obtaining them in practical tasks, future research will look into semi-supervised or unsupervised related CD algorithms.