MTN: A Multi-Scale Transformer Network for Different Resolution Remote Sensing Images Change Detection

In the field of change detection, detecting changes in images with different resolutions is crucial for both long-term interval scenes and scenarios that require rapid detection. However, existing methods face two main issues. Firstly, they require more stringent prior knowledge. The SPM-based methods require pixel-level class labeling of high-resolution(HR) images, while the approaches based on image super-resolution require HR images corresponding to low-resolutionr(LR) images. Such prior knowledge is either costly for labeling or difficult to meet in realistic scenarios. The second is that redundant error accumulation affects detection accuracy. Whether in traditional sub-pixel mapping(SPM) methods or deep learning methods based on image super-resolution, the final detection results are obtained after generating HR images from LR images. The redundant error produced in this step will be accumulated and affect the final detection results. Although the unsupervised methods do not have this problem, the detection accuracy is not as good as that of the supervised. To address these issues, we propose a multi-scale Transformer network(MTN). This model first uses a multi-scale feature extractor(MFE) to extract multi-scale features and perform scale matching at the feature level. Then, the Transformer is used to extract long-range relationships of ground objects on the multi-scale features to enhance the features. Finally, the multi-scale features are fused, and a classifier composed of a convolutional network is used to obtain binary change detection results. In addition, we consider that the edges of objects may be affected during the scale matching process, and introduce a CEBoundary Loss to better detect object edges. The results on the LEVIR and Google datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. The source code of MTN is available at https://github.com/Gavin-debug/MultiResolutionCD.