Optical Remote Sensing Image Change Detection Based on Attention Mechanism and Image Difference

This study presents a new end-to-end change detection network, called difference-enhancement dense-attention convolutional neural network (DDCNN), that is designed for detection of changes in the bitemporal optical remote sensing images. To model the internal correlation between high-level and low-level features, a dense attention method consisting of several up-sampling attention units is proposed. Both the up-sampling spatial and up-sampling channel attention are adopted by the unit. The unit, which can use high-level features with rich category information to guide the selection of low-level features, can use the spatial context information to capture the changed features of ground objects. Furthermore, DDCNN also pays attention to the differentiating features of the bitemporal images. By introducing a DE unit, each pixel is weighted and the features are selectively aggregated. The combination of dense attention and the DE unit improves the effectiveness of the network and its accuracy in extracting the change features. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated via five challenge data sets. The experimental results show that DDCNN achieves new state-of-the-art change detection performance on these five challenging data sets. For the seasonal change detection data set in particular, compared with the best existing change detection model, the proposed method increases the F1 score and IoU by 2.96% and 5.17%, respectively; compared with the baseline method, our method improved 3.75% and 6.50% on the F1 score and IoU, respectively.