CTS-Unet : Urban change detection by convolutional Siamese concatenate network with Swin transformer

Due to the fast progress of Deep Learning (DL) methods in remote sensing applications, many change detection (CD) algorithms have been recently proposed based on CNN networks and the mechanism of self-attention. These algorithms extract features without focusing on the temporal dependency between features. This shortcoming led to the introduction of the Transformer mechanism. In this paper, we design a convolutional transformer network with a Siamese U-shaped structure and name it CTS-Unet to solve the CD prob-lem. We exploit the ability of the CNN to extract effective semantic features and that of the transformer to extract global information effectively. The Siamese architecture allows using CNN to simultaneously extract effective semantic features from low-resolution bi-temporal images. The transformer part contains an encoder and a decoder, all of which use the Swin transformer module as their basic unit. The encoder processes the features extracted from the CNN using patch merging and the Swin transformer module to produce semantic features. The encoder extracts the detailed information from the features using patch expansion, the Swin transformer module, and convolutional upsampling to create a CD map. The experiments were performed on the widely used LEVIR-CD and DSIFN-CD datasets. Compared with other state-of-the-art CD methods, CTS-Unet provides higher performance with F1-scores of 91.87% and 69.60% for LEVIR-CD and DSIFN-CD datasets, respectively.(c) 2023 COSPAR. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.