VcT: Visual change Transformer for Remote Sensing Image Change Detection

TL;DR

This paper introduces VcT, a novel Transformer-based model that leverages background context and structured graph modeling to improve remote sensing image change detection accuracy.

Contribution

The paper proposes a new visual change Transformer (VcT) that mines background information and uses graph neural networks for enhanced change detection.

Findings

Outperforms existing methods on benchmark datasets

Effectively mines reliable tokens for change map refinement

Improves consistency in representations across varied conditions

Abstract

Existing visual change detectors usually adopt CNNs or Transformers for feature representation learning and focus on learning effective representation for the changed regions between images. Although good performance can be obtained by enhancing the features of the change regions, however, these works are still limited mainly due to the ignorance of mining the unchanged background context information. It is known that one main challenge for change detection is how to obtain the consistent representations for two images involving different variations, such as spatial variation, sunlight intensity, etc. In this work, we demonstrate that carefully mining the common background information provides an important cue to learn the consistent representations for the two images which thus obviously facilitates the visual change detection problem. Based on this observation, we propose a novel Visual change Transformer (VcT) model for visual change detection problem. To be specific, a shared backbone network is first used to extract the feature maps for the given image pair. Then, each pixel of feature map is regarded as a graph node and the graph neural network is proposed to model the structured information for coarse change map prediction. Top-K reliable tokens can be mined from the map and refined by using the clustering algorithm. Then, these reliable tokens are enhanced by first utilizing self/cross-attention schemes and then interacting with original features via an anchor-primary attention learning module. Finally, the prediction head is proposed to get a more accurate change map. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets validated the effectiveness of our proposed VcT model.