Modern change detection (CD) has achieved remarkable success by the powerful discriminative ability of deep convolutions. However, high-resolution remote sensing CD remains challenging due to the complexity of objects in the scene. The objects with the same semantic concept show distinct spectral behaviors at different times and different spatial locations. Modeling interactions between global semantic concepts is critical for change recognition. Most recent change detection pipelines using pure convolutions are still struggling to relate long-range concepts in space-time. Non-local self-attention approaches show promising performance via modeling dense relations among pixels, yet are computationally inefficient. In this paper, we propose a bitemporal image transformer (BiT) to efficiently and effectively model contexts within the spatial-temporal domain. Our intuition is that the high-level concepts of the change of interest can be represented by a few visual words, i.e., semantic tokens. To achieve this, we express the bitemporal image into a few tokens, and use a transformer encoder to model contexts in the compact token-based space-time. The learned context-rich tokens are then feedback to the pixel-space for refining the original features via a transformer decoder. We incorporate BiT in a deep feature differencing-based CD framework. Extensive experiments on three public CD datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method. Notably, our BiT-based model significantly outperforms the purely convolutional baseline using only 3 times lower computational costs and model parameters. Based on a naive backbone (ResNet18) without sophisticated structures (e.g., FPN, UNet), our model surpasses several state-of-the-art CD methods, including better than two recent attention-based methods in terms of efficiency and accuracy. Our code will be made public.

介绍了一种基于双时相图像转换器的新颖的深度学习框架，用于高分辨率遥感图像变化检测，该框架通过对空时时域内的上下文进行编码来优化特征提取，实现更快速，更准确的目标检测，相对于现有的基于注意力机制的方法，本文提出的方法在提高准确性的同时，可以节省更多的计算成本。

远程感知图像变化检测与Transformer