A CNN-Transformer Network With Multiscale Context Aggregation for Fine-Grained Cropland Change Detection

Nonagriculturalization incidents are serious threats to local agricultural ecosystem and global food security. Remote sensing change detection (CD) can provide an effective approach for in-time detection and prevention of such incidents. However, existing CD methods are difficult to deal with the large intraclass differences of cropland changes in high-resolution images. In addition, traditional CNN based models are plagued by the loss of long-range context information, and the high computational complexity brought by deep layers. Therefore, in this article, we propose a CNN-transformer network with multiscale context aggregation (MSCANet), which combines the merits of CNN and transformer to fulfill efficient and effective cropland CD. In the MSCANet, a CNN-based feature extractor is first utilized to capture hierarchical features, then a transformer-based MSCA is designed to encode and aggregate context information. Finally, a multibranch prediction head with three CNN classifiers is applied to obtain change maps, to enhance the supervision for deep layers. Besides, for the lack of CD dataset with fine-grained cropland change of interest, we also provide a new cropland change detection dataset, which contains 600 pairs of 512 × 512 bi-temporal images with the spatial resolution of 0.5–2m. Comparative experiments with several CD models prove the effectiveness of the MSCANet, with the highest F1 of 64.67% on the high-resolution semantic CD dataset, and of 71.29% on CLCD.