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

TL;DR

This paper introduces FlickCD, a lightweight yet highly effective remote sensing change detection model that significantly reduces resource use while maintaining state-of-the-art accuracy, suitable for on-satellite processing.

Contribution

FlickCD is a novel lightweight change detection framework that combines an Enhanced Difference Module with local-global fusion blocks to optimize performance-resource trade-offs.

Findings

Reduces computational and storage costs by over an order of magnitude.

Achieves state-of-the-art performance or less than 1% F1 accuracy loss.

Validated on four benchmark datasets.

Abstract

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.