Robust feature aggregation network for lightweight and effective remote sensing image change detection

In remote sensing (RS) image change detection (CD) task, many existing CD methods focus more on how to improve accuracy, but they usually have more parameters, higher computational costs, and heavier memory usage. Designing lightweight and performance-sustainable CD model that is more compatible with real-world applications is an urgent problem to be solved. Therefore, we propose a lightweight change detection network, called as robust feature aggregation network (RFANet). To improve representative capability of weaker features extracted from lightweight backbone, a feature reinforcement module (FRM) is proposed. FRM allows current level feature to densely interact and fuse with other level features, thus accomplishing the complementarity of fine-grained details and semantic information. Considering massive objects with rich correlations in RS images, we design semantic split-aggregation module (SSAM) to better capture global semantic information of changed objects. Besides, we present a lightweight decoder containing channel interaction module (CIM), which allows multi-level refined difference features to emphasize changed areas and suppress background and pseudo-changes. Extensive experiments carried out on four challenging RS image CD datasets illustrate that RFANet achieves competitive performance with fewer parameters and lower computational costs. The source code is available at https://github.com/Youzhihui/RFANet.