# Pushing Trade-Off Boundaries: Compact yet Effective Remote Sensing Change Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.21109 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21109/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Jun 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [ShuffleNet: An Extremely Efficient Convolutional Neural Network for Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.01083/) (2017)
- [MobileViT: Light-weight, General-purpose, and Mobile-friendly Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02178/) (2021)
- [Axial-DeepLab: Stand-Alone Axial-Attention for Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07853/) (2020)
- [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)
- [A Transformer-Based Siamese Network for Change Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.01293/) (2022)
- [Run, Don't Walk: Chasing Higher FLOPS for Faster Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03667/) (2023)
- [RepViT: Revisiting Mobile CNN From ViT Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09283/) (2023)
- [ChangeMamba: Remote Sensing Change Detection With Spatiotemporal State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03425/) (2024)
- [TINYCD: A (Not So) Deep Learning Model For Change Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.13159/) (2022)
- [Dual-Tasks Siamese Transformer Framework for Building Damage Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.10953/) (2022)
- [ObjFormer: Learning Land-Cover Changes From Paired OSM Data and Optical High-Resolution Imagery via Object-Guided Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02674/) (2023)
- [Relating CNN-Transformer Fusion Network for Change Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03178/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [UAV-DETR: DETR for Anti-Drone Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.22841/) (2026)
- [Towards Onboard Continuous Change Detection for Floods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.13751/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Remote sensing change detection is essential for monitoring urban expansion, disaster assessment, and resource management, offering timely, accurate, and large-scale insights into dynamic landscape transformations. While deep learning has revolutionized change detection, the increasing complexity and computational demands of modern models have not necessarily translated into significant accuracy gains. Instead of following this trend, this study explores a more efficient approach, focusing on lightweight models that maintain high accuracy while minimizing resource consumption, which is an essential requirement for on-satellite processing. To this end, we propose FlickCD, which means quick flick then get great results, pushing the boundaries of the performance-resource trade-off. FlickCD introduces an Enhanced Difference Module (EDM) to amplify critical feature differences between temporal phases while suppressing irrelevant variations such as lighting and weather changes, thereby reducing computational costs in the subsequent change decoder. Additionally, the FlickCD decoder incorporates Local-Global Fusion Blocks, leveraging Shifted Window Self-Attention (SWSA) and Efficient Global Self-Attention (EGSA) to effectively capture semantic information at multiple scales, preserving both coarse- and fine-grained changes. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that FlickCD reduces computational and storage overheads by more than an order of magnitude while achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance or incurring only a minor (<1% F1) accuracy trade-off. The implementation code is publicly available at https://github.com/xulsh8/FlickCD.