Adjacent-level Feature Cross-Fusion with 3D CNN for Remote Sensing Image Change Detection

Deep learning-based change detection using remote sensing images has received increasing attention in recent years. However, how to effectively extract and fuse the deep features of bi-temporal images to improve the accuracy of change detection is still a challenge. To address that, a novel adjacent-level feature fusion network with 3D convolution (named AFCF3D-Net) is proposed in this article. First, through the inner fusion property of 3D convolution, we design a new feature fusion way that can simultaneously extract and fuse the feature information from bi-temporal images. Then, in order to bridge the semantic gap between low-level features and high-level features, we propose an adjacent-level feature cross-fusion (AFCF) module to aggregate complementary feature information between the adjacent-levels. Furthermore, the densely skip connection strategy is introduced to improve the capability of pixel-wise prediction and compactness of changed objects in the results. Finally, the proposed AFCF3D-Net has been validated on the three challenging remote sensing change detection datasets: Wuhan building dataset (WHU-CD), LEVIR building dataset (LEVIR-CD), and Sun Yat-Sen University (SYSU-CD). The results of quantitative analysis and qualitative comparison demonstrate that the proposed AFCF3D-Net achieves better performance compared to the other state-of-the-art change detection methods.