HARNU-Net: Hierarchical Attention Residual Nested U-Net for Change Detection in Remote Sensing Images

Change detection (CD) is a particularly important task in the field of remote sensing image processing. It is of practical importance for people when making decisions about transitional situations on the Earth’s surface. The existing CD methods focus on the design of feature extraction network, ignoring the strategy fusion and attention enhancement of the extracted features, which will lead to the problems of incomplete boundary of changed area and missing detection of small targets in the final output change map. To overcome the above problems, we proposed a hierarchical attention residual nested U-Net (HARNU-Net) for remote sensing image CD. First, the backbone network is composed of a Siamese network and nested U-Net. We remold the convolution block in nested U-Net and proposed ACON-Relu residual convolution block (A-R), which reduces the missed detection rate of the backbone network in small change areas. Second, this paper proposed the adjacent feature fusion module (AFFM). Based on the adjacency fusion strategy, the module effectively integrates the details and semantic information of multi-level features, so as to realize the feature complementarity and spatial mutual enhancement between adjacent features. Finally, the hierarchical attention residual module (HARM) is proposed, which locally filters and enhances the features in a more fine-grained space to output a much better change map. Adequate experiments on three challenging benchmark public datasets, CDD, LEVIR-CD and BCDD, show that our method outperforms several other state-of-the-art methods and performs excellent in F1, IOU and visual image quality