SRDFNet: Semantic Refinement and Differential Features for High-Resolution Change Detection

To address misclassification and reduced accuracy in semantic change detection caused by class imbalance and variable object sizes, this paper improves BGSNet and proposes a new change detection network, SRDFNet (Semantic Refinement and Differential Features). Based on BGSNet’s framework, it introduces three complementary modules: (1) a hierarchical graph module (HGM) that converts multi-scale feature maps into compact semantic graph nodes, using graph attention for intra-layer and cross-level semantic interaction to enhance topological relationship perception; the HGM mitigates the effects of class imbalance by compacting multi-scale features into semantic nodes; (2) a difference enhancement (DE) module that extracts multi-receptive-field difference information from bi-temporal concatenated features via multi-scale parallel convolution branches; (3) a semantic refine (SR) module that performs lightweight residual refinement on bi-temporal semantic features to improve the segmentation accuracy. The DE and SR modules mitigate the degradation in semantic segmentation accuracy caused by variable object sizes. It is trained and tested with BGSNet and three other models on the SECOND and HRSCD datasets. For the SECOND dataset, in terms of five quantitative indicators, namely OA, mIoU, SeK, F1 and recall, SRDFNet achieves 87.64%, 70.31%, 20.36%, 60.25% and 65.27%, respectively. Compared with BGSNet, it gains performance increases of 1.34%, 0.73%, 1.44%, 0.81% and 2.72%, respectively. For the HRSCD dataset, SRDFNet achieves 98.13% (OA), 52.67% (mIoU), 73.77% (SeK), 88.86% (F1) and 88.18% (recall), ranking first among the four methods. Compared with BGSNet, it gains performance increases of 3.96%, 3.93%, 9.69%, 2.33% and 4.00%, respectively.