Current transformer-based change detection (CD) approaches either employ a pre-trained model trained on large-scale image classification ImageNet dataset or rely on first pre-training on another CD dataset and then fine-tuning on the target benchmark. This current strategy is driven by the fact that transformers typically require a large amount of training data to learn inductive biases, which is insufficient in standard CD datasets due to their small size. We develop an end-to-end CD approach with transformers that is trained from scratch and yet achieves state-of-the-art performance on four public benchmarks. Instead of using conventional self-attention that struggles to capture inductive biases when trained from scratch, our architecture utilizes a shuffled sparse-attention operation that focuses on selected sparse informative regions to capture the inherent characteristics of the CD data. Moreover, we introduce a change-enhanced feature fusion (CEFF) module to fuse the features from input image pairs by performing a per-channel re-weighting. Our CEFF module aids in enhancing the relevant semantic changes while suppressing the noisy ones. Extensive experiments on four CD datasets reveal the merits of the proposed contributions, achieving gains as high as 14.27\% in intersection-over-union (IoU) score, compared to the best-published results in the literature. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/mustansarfiaz/ScratchFormer}.

本文提出了一种全新的变化检测方法，采用转换器进行从头开始训练，并在四个公共基准测试中实现了最先进的性能。该方法使用一种混洗的稀疏注意力操作来捕获CD数据的固有特征，并介绍了一种改变增强的特征融合模块来提高相关语义变化，同时抑制噪声。

使用从头开始训练的Transformer进行遥感变化检测