Enhancing a Building Change Detection Model in Remote Sensing Imagery for Encroachments and Construction on Government Lands in Egypt as a Case Study

Change detection (CD) in optical remote-sensing images is a critical task for applications such as urban planning, disaster monitoring, and environmental assessment. While UNet-based architecture has demonstrated strong performance in CD tasks, it often struggles with capturing deep hierarchical features due to the limitations of plain convolutional layers. Conversely, ResNet architectures excel at learning deep features through residual connections but may lack precise localization capabilities. To address these challenges, we propose ResUNet++, a novel hybrid architecture that combines the strengths of ResNet and UNet for accurate and robust change detection. ResUNet++ integrates residual blocks into the UNet framework to enhance feature representation and mitigate gradient vanishing problems. Additionally, we introduce a Multi-Scale Feature Fusion (MSFF) module to aggregate features at different scales, improving the detection of both large and small changes. Experimental results on multiple datasets (EGY-CD, S2Looking, and LEVIR-CD) demonstrate that ResUNet++ outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving higher precision, recall, and F1-scores while maintaining computational efficiency.