LRDE-Net: Large Receptive Field and Image Difference Enhancement Network for Remote Sensing Images Change Detection

In the field of remote sensing, change detection is a crucial study area. Deep learning has made significant strides in the study of remote sensing image change detection during the past few years. Deep learning techniques still have some drawbacks. The global context cannot be modeled by convolutional neural networks due to the receptive field's restrictions. When extracting visual characteristics, the neural network does not concentrate more on the change region, which results in poor distinction between change and no-change regions. To address these problems, we propose networks with large receptive fields (LRFs) and difference image enhancement. First, we design the LRF strategy. It employs a long kernel shape in one spatial dimension for obtaining a long range of relations. Keeping a narrow kernel size in the other spatial dimension can extract local context information while avoiding interference from irrelevant regions. To focus on the changing features, we design the image difference enhancement (IDE) method, which decreases the distance between invariant features and enlarges the distance between changing features. In addition, we design the cross-channel interaction (CNI) strategy, which models the relationship between feature map channels and extracts feature representations through local CNI. On the CDD, WHU-CD, and LEVIR-CD public datasets, we conducted comprehensive experiments. According to the experimental results, our proposed LRDE-Net performs better than other state-of-the-art change detection techniques, and the change regions are more precisely identified. It can better cope with seasonal changes, light intensity, and other pseudochange disturbances.