IDAN: Image Difference Attention Network for Change Detection

Remote sensing image change detection is of great importance in disaster assessment and urban planning. The mainstream method is to use encoder-decoder models to detect the change region of two input images. Since the change content of remote sensing images has the characteristics of wide scale range and variety, it is necessary to improve the detection accuracy of the network by increasing the attention mechanism, which commonly includes: Squeeze-and-Excitation block, Non-local and Convolutional Block Attention Module, among others. These methods consider the importance of different location features between channels or within channels, but fail to perceive the differences between input images. In this paper, we propose a novel image difference attention network (IDAN). In the image preprocessing stage, we use a pre-training model to extract the feature differences between two input images to obtain the feature difference map (FD-map), and Canny for edge detection to obtain the edge difference map (ED-map). In the image feature extracting stage, the FD-map and ED-map are input to the feature difference attention module and edge compensation module, respectively, to optimize the features extracted by IDAN. Finally, the change detection result is obtained through the feature difference operation. IDAN comprehensively considers the differences in regional and edge features of images and thus optimizes the extracted image features. The experimental results demonstrate that the F1-score of IDAN improves 1.62% and 1.98% compared to the baseline model on WHU dataset and LEVIR-CD dataset, respectively.