Causal Decoupling Domain Generalization for Remote Sensing Change Detection

While current state-of-the-art Remote Sensing Change Detection (RSCD) methods can achieve impressive results on individual datasets, they become unreliable in unseen environments and imaging conditions, with performance metrics declining by as much as 60% to 80%. Simultaneously, variable environments and complex imaging conditions are the main characteristics of remote sensing data, calling for generalizable RSCD methods. To address this issue, we propose a novel RSCD method capable of domain generalization—CDDGNet. This method is based on causal decoupling theory, which progressively decouples invariant change features from variable domain features to extract generalizable characteristics. This enables a network trained on a single domain to accurately identify change regions in other domains. Specifically, firstly, the Causal Feature Adaptation Module is proposed to preliminarily decouple and simplify feature information during the encoding process by using wavelet transformation and feature energy spectralization methods. Secondly, the Causal Feature Fusion Module is presented to fully decouple features and aggregate significant change features during the decoding process through frequency domain processing and feature re-attention mechanisms. Thirdly, the Decoupling Effect Loss Function is proposed to optimize the process by evaluating the effectiveness of causal decoupling. Extensive experiments have shown that our model significantly outperforms existing methods across multiple groups of generalization tasks with varying levels of difficulty.