DDAM-Net: A Difference-Directed Multi-Scale Attention Mechanism Network for Cultivated Land Change Detection

Declining cultivated land poses a serious threat to food security. However, existing Change Detection (CD) methods are insufficient for overcoming intra-class differences in cropland, and the accumulation of irrelevant features and loss of key features leads to poor detection results. To effectively identify changes in agricultural land, we propose a Difference-Directed Multi-scale Attention Mechanism Network (DDAM-Net). Specifically, we use a feature extraction module to effectively extract the cropland's multi-scale features from dual-temporal images, and we introduce a Difference Enhancement Fusion Module (DEFM) and a Cross-scale Aggregation Module (CAM) to pass and fuse the multi-scale and difference features layer by layer. In addition, we introduce the Attention Refinement Module (ARM) to optimize the edge and detail features of changing objects. In the experiments, we evaluated the applicability of DDAM-Net on the HN-CLCD dataset for cropland CD and non-agricultural identification, with F1 and precision of 79.27% and 80.70%, respectively. In addition, generalization experiments using the publicly accessible PX-CLCD and SET-CLCD datasets revealed F1 and precision values of 95.12% and 95.47%, and 72.40% and 77.59%, respectively. The relevant comparative and ablation experiments suggested that DDAM-Net has greater performance and reliability in detecting cropland changes.