Exchanging Dual-Encoder–Decoder: A New Strategy for Change Detection With Semantic Guidance and Spatial Localization

Change detection is a critical task in earth observation applications. Recently, deep-learning-based methods have shown promising performance and are quickly adopted in change detection. However, the widely used multiple encoders and single decoder (MESD) as well as dual-encoder–decoder (DED) architectures still struggle to effectively handle change detection well. The former has problems of bitemporal feature interference in the feature-level fusion, while the latter is inapplicable to intraclass change detection (ICCD) and multiview building change detection (MVBCD). To solve these problems, we propose a new strategy with an exchanging DED (EDED) structure for binary change detection with semantic guidance and spatial localization. The proposed strategy solves the problems of bitemporal feature inference in MESD by fusing bitemporal features in the decision level and the inapplicability in DED by determining changed areas using bitemporal semantic features. We build a binary change detection model based on this strategy and then validate and compare it with 18 state-of-the-art change detection methods on six datasets in three scenarios, including ICCD datasets (CDD and SYSU), single-view building change detection (SVBCD) datasets (WHU, LEVIR-CD, and LEVIR-CD+), and an MVBCD dataset (NJDS). The experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves superior performance with high efficiency and outperforms all benchmark methods with F1-scores of 97.77%, 83.07%, 94.86%, 92.33%, 91.39%, and 74.35% on CDD, SYSU, WHU, LEVIR-CD, LEVIR-CD+, and NJDS datasets, respectively. The code of this work will be available at https://github.com/NJU-LHRS/official-SGSLN.