Integrating Local-Global Structural Interaction Using Siamese Graph Neural Network for Urban Land Use Change Detection From VHR Satellite Images

Detecting land use changes in urban areas from very-high-resolution (VHR) satellite images presents two primary challenges: 1) traditional methods focus mainly on comparing changes in land cover-related features, which are insufficient for detecting changes in land use and are prone to pseudo-changes caused by illumination differences, seasonal variations, and subtle structural changes and 2) spatial structural information, which is characterized by topological relationships among land cover objects, is crucial for urban land use classification but remains underexplored in change detection. To address these challenges, this study developed a local-global structural interaction network (LGSI-Net) based on a Siamese graph neural network (SGNN) that integrates high-level structural and semantic information to detect urban land use changes from bitemporal VHR images. We developed both local structural feature interaction module (LSIM) and global structural feature interaction module (GSIM) to enhance the representation of bitemporal structural features at the global scene graph and local object node levels. Experiments on the publicly available MtS-WH dataset and two generated datasets, LUCD-FZ and LUCD-HF, show that the proposed method outperforms the existing bag of visual word (BoVW)-based method and CorrFusionNet. Furthermore, we evaluated the detection performance for different semantic feature extraction strategies and structural feature extraction backbones. The results demonstrate that the proposed method, which integrates high-level semantic and graph isomorphism network (GIN)-derived structural features achieves the best performance. The method trained on the LUCD-FZ dataset was successfully transferred to the LUCD-HF dataset with different urban landscapes, indicating its effectiveness in detecting land use changes from VHR satellite images, even in areas with relatively large imbalances between changed and unchanged samples.