Shuffle-CDNet: A Lightweight Network for Change Detection of Bitemporal Remote-Sensing Images

Change detection is an important task in remote-sensing image analysis. With the widespread development of deep learning in change detection, most of the current methods improve detection performance by making the network deeper and wider, but ignore the inference time and computational costs of the network. Therefore, this paper proposes a lightweight change-detection network called Shuffle-CDNet. It accepts the six-channel image that concatenates the bitemporal images by channel as the input, and it adopts the backbone network with channel shuffle operation and depthwise separable convolution layers. The classifier uses a lightweight atrous spatial pyramid pooling (Light-ASPP) module to reduce computational costs. The edge-information feature extracted by a lightweight branch is integrated with the shallow and deep features extracted by the backbone network, and the spatial and channel attention mechanisms are introduced to enhance the expression of features. At the same time, logit knowledge distillation and data augmentation techniques are used in the training phase to improve detection performance. Experimental results showed that the proposed method achieves a better balance in computational efficiency and detection performance compared with other advanced methods.