LAUSR

ABSTRACT Recent change detection (CD) methods focus on the extraction of deep change semantic features. However, existing methods overlook the fine-grained features and have the poor ability to capture long-range space–time information, which leads to the micro changes missing and the edges of change types smoothing. In this paper, a potential transformer-based semantic change detection (SCD) model, Pyramid-SCDFormer is proposed, which precisely recognizes the small changes and fine edges details of the changes. The SCD model selectively merges different semantic tokens in multi-head self-attention block to obtain multiscale features, which is crucial for extraction information of remote sensing images (RSIs) with multiple changes from different scales. Moreover, we create a well-annotated SCD dataset, Landsat-SCD with unprecedented time series and change types in complex scenarios. Comparing with three Convolutional Neural Network-based, one attention-based, and two transformer-based networks, experimental results demonstrate that the Pyramid-SCDFormer stably outperforms the existing state-of-the-art CD models and obtains an improvement in MIoU/F1 of 1.11/0.76%, 0.57/0.50%, and 8.75/8.59% on the LEVIR-CD, WHU_CD, and Landsat-SCD dataset respectively. For change classes proportion less than 1%, the proposed model improves the MIoU by 7.17–19.53% on Landsat-SCD dataset. The recognition performance for small-scale and fine edges of change types has greatly improved.