Spatial–Spectral Attention Network Guided With Change Magnitude Image for Land Cover Change Detection Using Remote Sensing Images

Land cover change detection (LCCD) using remote sensing images (RSIs) plays an important role in natural disaster evaluation, forest deformation monitoring, and wildfire destruction detection. However, bitemporal images are usually acquired at different atmospheric conditions, such as sun height and soil moisture, which usually cause pseudo and noise change in the change detection map. Changed areas on the ground also generally have various shapes and sizes, consequently making the utilization of spatial contextual information a challenging task. In this article, we design a novel neural network with a spatial–spectral attention mechanism and multiscale dilation convolution modules. This work is based on the previously demonstrated promising performance of convolutional neural network for LCCD with RSIs and attempts to capture more positive changes and further enhance the detection accuracies. The learning of the proposed neural network is guided with a change magnitude image. The performance and feasibility of the proposed network are validated with four pairs of RSIs that depict real land cover change events on the Earth’s surface. Comparison of the performance of the proposed approach with that of five state-of-art methods indicates the superiority of the proposed network in terms of ten quantitative evaluation metrics and visual performance. Such as, the proposed network achieved an improvement of about 0.08%–14.87% in terms of overall accuracy (OA) for Dataset-A.