A Multiscale Cascaded Cross-Attention Hierarchical Network for Change Detection on Bitemporal Remote Sensing Images

Xiaofeng Zhang, Liejun Wang, Shuli Cheng

Abstract: Remote sensing image change detection (RSCD) is an important task in remote sensing image interpretation. Some recent RSCD works focus on the extraction and interaction of global and local information; however, the current work underuses hierarchical features and may introduce noise from shallow encoders. In this article, we propose a multiscale cascaded cross-attention hierarchical network (MSCCA-Net). This network uses a large kernel convolution formed by stacking small kernel convolutions combined with an efficient transformer as the backbone network to achieve local and global feature extraction and fusion. We proposed for the first time the idea of bottom-up level-by-level fusion of hierarchical features, based on which we designed the multiscale cascade cross-attention (MSCCA) cross-fusion hierarchical features level by level from the bottom upward, realizing the redistribution of spatial and semantic information, and thus enhancing the gainful effect of the skip connection mechanism in the field of RSCD. Our experiments on three public datasets show that MSCCA is able to efficiently perform the reorganization of hierarchical features, thus avoiding misdetection and omission of small targets. Meanwhile, MSCCA-Net has more excellent comprehensive performance compared with other state-of-the-art methods.