HCGMNet: A Hierarchical Change Guiding Map Network for Change Detection

Very-high-resolution (VHR) remote sensing (RS) image change detection (CD) has been a challenging task for its very rich spatial information and sample imbalance problem. In this paper, we have proposed a hierarchical change guiding map network (HCGMNet) for VHR RS change detection. The model uses hierarchical convolution operations to extract multi-scale features, continuously merges multi-scale features layer by layer to improve the expression of global and local information, and guides the model to gradually refine edge features and comprehensive performance by a change guide module (CGM), which is a self-attention with changing guide map. Extensive experiments on two CD datasets show that the proposed HCGMNet architecture achieves better CD performance than existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) CD methods.