DDRL: Domain Distribution Reconstruction Learning for Binary Change Detection in Remote Sensing Images

Change detection (CD) aims to identify and locate changes in the same observed surface coverage area across bitemporal images. This technique has widespread applications in urban planning, land use, and disaster damage extraction. Deep learning-based CD methods typically use learnable encoders to map bitemporal images to a common domain distribution space, allowing for the discrimination and localization of change and invariant features. However, due to differences in imaging mechanisms, seasons, and shooting angles, a large number of pseudochanges may easily appear, affecting the accurate recognition of the domain distribution space. In addition, binary CD focuses solely on whether scene targets have changed, resulting in change labels that encompass a variety of different objects, thus increasing the significance of intraclass differences. To address the aforementioned issues, we propose a domain distribution reconstruction learning (DDRL) framework for binary CD, which effectively mitigates the problem of pseudochanges by detecting abnormal feature domain distributions. Specifically, DDRL first extracts multiscale features from bitemporal images using a Siamese cross-window self-attention module, achieving feature domain transformation from the original space. Subsequently, it employs a graph attention enhanced (GAE) module to improve the low-level domain distribution, enabling it to focus on change regions. In addition, DDRL utilizes a cross-domain feature contrastive learning (CFCL) module for reconstructive learning of high-level fused features. This process ensures that intraclass features are compact, while interclass features are dispersed within the high-level domain distribution, thereby significantly improving the domain distribution representation to discriminate pseudochanges. Experimental results show that the proposed DDRL performs excellently across multiple public datasets, surpassing mainstream methods and significantly improving CD performance. The source code will be made available at <uri xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://github.com/yzygit1230/DDRL</uri>.