CAFENet: Change-Aware and Fourier Feature Exchange Network for Cropland Change Detection in Remote Sensing Images

The accelerated non-agriculturalization of cropland has increasingly highlighted the importance of remote sensing (RS) change detection (CD) for monitoring land-use transitions. However, variations in RS imaging conditions and irregular cropland changes often result in noisy or inaccurate change maps. To address these challenges, we propose a novel deep learning framework named change-aware and fourier feature exchange Network (CAFENet). The method introduces a dedicated change-aware (CA) branch to extract discriminative change cues from pseudo-video sequences and integrates them into the backbone network. A fourier feature exchange module (FFEM) is designed to reduce brightness, color, and style discrepancies between bitemporal images, thereby enhancing robustness under varying acquisition conditions. Fused features are further refined using an efficient multi-scale attention mechanism (EMSA) to capture rich spatial details. In the decoding stage, a dynamic content-aware upsampling module (DCAU), together with skip connections, progressively recovers spatial resolution while preserving structural information. Experimental results on three datasets—CLCD, SW-CLCD, and LuojiaSET-CLCD—demonstrate that CAFENet achieves superior performance over state-of-the-art methods in terms of both accuracy and robustness, particularly in complex agricultural landscapes.