RSCDNet: A Robust Deep Learning Architecture for Change Detection From Bi-Temporal High Resolution Remote Sensing Images

Accurate change detection from high-resolution satellite and aerial images is of great significance in remote sensing for precise comprehension of Land cover (LC) variations. The current methods compromise with the spatial context; hence, they fail to detect and delineate small change areas and are unable to capture the difference between features of the bi-temporal images. This paper proposes Remote Sensing Change Detection Network (RSCDNet) - a robust end-to-end deep learning architecture for pixel-wise change detection from bi-temporal high-resolution remote-sensing (HRRS) images. The proposed RSCDNet model is based on an encoder-decoder framework integrated with the Modified Self-Attention (MSA) andthe Gated Linear Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (GL-ASPP) blocks; both efficient mechanisms to regulate the field-of-view while finding the most suitable trade-off between accurate localization and context assimilation. The paper documents the design and development of the proposed RSCDNet model and compares its qualitative and quantitative results with state-of-the-art HRRS change detection architectures. The above mentioned novelties in the proposed architecture resulted in an F1-score of 98%, 98%, 88%, and 75% on the four publicly available HRRS datasets namely, Staza-Tisadob, Onera, CD-LEVIR, and WHU. In addition to the improvement in the performance metrics, the strategic connections in the proposed GL-ASPP and MSA units significantly reduce the prediction time per image (PTPI) and provide robustness against perturbations. Experimental results yield that the proposed RSCDNet model outperforms the most recent change detection benchmark models on all four HRRS datasets.