A Transformer-Based Multi-Scale Semantic Extraction Change Detection Network for Building Change Application

Building change detection involves identifying areas where buildings have changed by comparing multi-temporal remote sensing imagery of the same geographical region. Recent advances in Transformer-based methods have significantly improved remote sensing change detection. However, current Transformer models still exhibit persistent limitations in effectively extracting multi-scale semantic features within complex scenarios. To more effectively extract multi-scale semantic features in complex scenes, we propose a novel model, which is the Transformer-based Multi-Scale Semantic Extraction Change Detection Network (MSSE-CDNet). The model employs a Siamese network architecture to enable precise change recognition. MSSE-CDNet comprises four parts, which together contain five modules: (1) a CNN feature extraction module, (2) a multi-scale semantic extraction module, (3) a Transformer encoder and decoder module, and (4) a prediction module. Comprehensive experiments on the standard LEVIR-CD benchmark for building change detection demonstrate our approach’s superiority over state-of-the-art methods. Compared to existing models such as FC-Siam-Di, FC-Siam-Conc, DTCTSCN, BIT, and SNUNet, MSSE-CDNet achieves significant and consistent gains in performance metrics, with F1 scores improved by 4.22%, 6.84%, 2.86%, 1.22%, and 2.37%, respectively, and Intersection over Union (IoU) improved by 6.78%, 10.74%, 4.65%, 2.02%, and 3.87%, respectively. These results robustly substantiate the effectiveness of our framework on an established benchmark dataset.