CTA-Net: A Cross-Temporal Attention Network for Change Detection in Remote Sensing Imagery

Accurate change detection in high-resolution remote sensing imagery is essential for urban planning, land-use monitoring, and disaster response. This study introduces CTA-Net, a Cross-Temporal Attention Network for binary change detection in bi-temporal optical imagery, designed to improve robustness against pseudo-changes caused by illumination variation, seasonal effects, and sensor noise. The proposed method employs a shared Siamese encoder with multi-scale Cross-Temporal Attention modules that derive spatial and channel attention from L2 feature differences, along with a lightweight confidence estimation head for per-pixel uncertainty modelling. A hybrid loss function combining confidence-weighted binary cross-entropy and focal loss is used to address class imbalance. Experiments on the LEVIR-CD dataset demonstrate that CTA-Net achieves an overall accuracy of 98.99%, an F1-score of 87.68%, an Intersection over Union of 78.06%, a Cohen’s kappa of 0.8715, and a Matthews Correlation Coefficient of 0.8721, with stable convergence and minimal overfitting. Qualitative and calibration analyses further indicate that the model produces interpretable attention maps and reliable probabilistic outputs. To evaluate cross-domain generalization, we conduct a transfer learning case study on multispectral Sentinel-2 agricultural imagery. The model is adapted to 11-channel input and fine-tuned on automatically generated change masks derived from NDVI-delta thresholding. Under this supervision protocol, CTA-Net achieves an F1-score of 95.18% and an IoU of 90.81% on a held-out test region, with balanced precision and recall. While these results demonstrate effective adaptation across sensor modality, spatial resolution, and semantic domain, the evaluation reflects agreement with the mask generation procedure rather than independently annotated ground truth. While CTA-Net shows strong performance and reasonable interpretability, its cross-domain evaluation is limited by the use of automatically generated labels. As a result, the reported transferability should be interpreted cautiously until validated on human-annotated datasets.