Semantic Change Detection in HR Remote Sensing Images With Joint Learning and Binary Change Enhancement Strategy

Semantic change detection (SCD) in high-resolution (HR) remote sensing images faces two issues: (1) isolated network branch for binary change detection (BCD) within multi-task architecture result in suboptimal SCD performance; (2) false alarms or missed detections caused by illumination differences or seasonal transform. To address these issues, this study proposes a bi-temporal binary change enhancement network (Bi-BCENet). Specifically, we introduce a binary change enhancement (BCE) strategy based on multi-network joint learning to achieve superior SCD via improving change areas prediction. Within the network’s reasoning process, we develop a cross-attention fusion module (CAFM) to enhance the global similarity modeling via cross-network prompt fusion, and we employ a cosine similarity-based auxiliary loss to optimize non-change’s semantic consistency. The experiments on SECOND and CINA-FX datasets demonstrate that Bi-BCENet outperforms representative SCD networks, achieving 62.08%, 84.95% in FSCD and 66.88%, 83.10% in mIoUsCD, respectively. And the ablation analysis of network validates Bi-BCENet’s effectiveness in reducing false alarms and missed detections in SCD results. Moreover, for specific SCD of cropland, Bi-BCENet shows its strong potential in single-to-multi SCD.