# Siamese Meets Diffusion Network: SMDNet for Enhanced Change Detection in High-Resolution RS Imagery

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.09325 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09325/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Inverse problems and image restoration, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 35 of its 72 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Jan 2024.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Inverse problems and image restoration](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/inverse-problems-and-image-restoration/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [Imagen Video: High Definition Video Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02303/) (2022)
- [UNet++: A Nested U-Net Architecture for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10165/) (2018)
- [Image Super-Resolution via Iterative Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07636/) (2021)
- [Diffusion Models in Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.04747/) (2022)
- [Denoising Diffusion Restoration Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11793/) (2022)
- [Tune-A-Video: One-Shot Tuning of Image Diffusion Models for Text-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.11565/) (2022)
- [ECA-Net: Efficient Channel Attention for Deep Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03151/) (2019)
- [Label-Efficient Semantic Segmentation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03126/) (2021)
- [Axial Attention in Multidimensional Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.12180/) (2019)
- [Fully Convolutional Siamese Networks for Change Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.08462/) (2018)
- [Remote Sensing Image Change Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00208/) (2021)
- [SegDiff: Image Segmentation with Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00390/) (2021)
- [SpectralGPT: Spectral Remote Sensing Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07113/) (2023)
- [A Transformer-Based Siamese Network for Change Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.01293/) (2022)
- [Diffusion Models for Medical Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04306/) (2022)
- [Diffusion models as plug-and-play priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09012/) (2022)
- [Restoring Vision in Adverse Weather Conditions with Patch-Based Denoising Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14626/) (2022)
- [Diffusion Models for Implicit Image Segmentation Ensembles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03145/) (2021)
- [Advancing Pose-Guided Image Synthesis with Progressive Conditional Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06313/) (2023)
- [Fast Unsupervised Brain Anomaly Detection and Segmentation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.03461/) (2022)
- [Building Change Detection for Remote Sensing Images Using a Dual Task Constrained Deep Siamese Convolutional Network Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.07726/) (2019)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08702/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Diffusion Models Meet Remote Sensing: Principles, Methods, and Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08926/) (2024)
- [Vision-Language Modeling Meets Remote Sensing: Models, Datasets and Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14361/) (2025)
- [Can Generative Geospatial Diffusion Models Excel as Discriminative Geospatial Foundation Models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07890/) (2025)
- [EHCTNet: Enhanced Hybrid of CNN and Transformer Network for Remote Sensing Image Change Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01238/) (2025)
- [Balanced Diffusion-Guided Fusion for Multimodal Remote Sensing Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23310/) (2025)
- [COP-GEN: Latent Diffusion Transformer for Copernicus Earth Observation Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.03239/) (2026)
- [Bi-temporal Gaussian Feature Dependency Guided Change Detection in Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.09539/) (2024)
- [Noise2Map: End-to-End Diffusion Model for Semantic Segmentation and Change Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.27889/) (2026)
- [ChangeFlow -- Latent Rectified Flow for Change Detection in Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15375/) (2026)
- [JL1-CC&QA: Extending the JL1-CD Benchmark with Change Captioning and Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.31745/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recently, the application of deep learning to change detection (CD) has significantly progressed in remote sensing images. In recent years, CD tasks have mostly used architectures such as CNN and Transformer to identify these changes. However, these architectures have shortcomings in representing boundary details and are prone to false alarms and missed detections under complex lighting and weather conditions. For that, we propose a new network, Siamese Meets Diffusion Network (SMDNet). This network combines the Siam-U2Net Feature Differential Encoder (SU-FDE) and the denoising diffusion implicit model to improve the accuracy of image edge change detection and enhance the model's robustness under environmental changes. First, we propose an innovative SU-FDE module that utilizes shared weight features to capture differences between time series images and identify similarities between features to enhance edge detail detection. Furthermore, we add an attention mechanism to identify key coarse features to improve the model's sensitivity and accuracy. Finally, the diffusion model of progressive sampling is used to fuse key coarse features, and the noise reduction ability of the diffusion model and the advantages of capturing the probability distribution of image data are used to enhance the adaptability of the model in different environments. Our method's combination of feature extraction and diffusion models demonstrates effectiveness in change detection in remote sensing images. The performance evaluation of SMDNet on LEVIR-CD, DSIFN-CD, and CDD datasets yields validated F1 scores of 90.99%, 88.40%, and 88.47%, respectively. This substantiates the advanced capabilities of our model in accurately identifying variations and intricate details.