Change detection (CD) is an important yet challenging task in the Earth observation field for monitoring Earth surface dynamics. The advent of deep learning techniques has recently propelled automatic CD into a technological revolution. Nevertheless, deep learning-based CD methods are still plagued by two primary issues: 1) insufficient temporal relationship modeling and 2) pseudo-change misclassification. To address these issues, we complement the strong temporal modeling ability of metric learning with the prominent fitting ability of segmentation and propose a deep change feature learning (DeepCL) framework for robust and explainable CD. Firstly, we designed a hard sample-aware contrastive loss, which reweights the importance of hard and simple samples. This loss allows for explicit modeling of the temporal correlation between bi-temporal remote sensing images. Furthermore, the modeled temporal relations are utilized as knowledge prior to guide the segmentation process for detecting change regions. The DeepCL framework is thoroughly evaluated both theoretically and experimentally, demonstrating its superior feature discriminability, resilience against pseudo changes, and adaptability to a variety of CD algorithms. Extensive comparative experiments substantiate the quantitative and qualitative superiority of DeepCL over state-of-the-art CD approaches.

Recently, change detection (CD) of remote sensing images have achieved great progress with the advances of deep learning. However, current methods generally deliver incomplete CD regions and irregular CD boundaries due to the limited representation ability of the extracted visual features. To relieve these issues, in this work we propose a novel learning framework named Fully Transformer Network (FTN) for remote sensing image CD, which improves the feature extraction from a global view and combines multi-level visual features in a pyramid manner. More specifically, the proposed framework first utilizes the advantages of Transformers in long-range dependency modeling. It can help to learn more discriminative global-level features and obtain complete CD regions. Then, we introduce a pyramid structure to aggregate multi-level visual features from Transformers for feature enhancement. The pyramid structure grafted with a Progressive Attention Module (PAM) can improve the feature representation ability with additional interdependencies through channel attentions. Finally, to better train the framework, we utilize the deeply-supervised learning with multiple boundaryaware loss functions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method achieves a new state-of-the-art performance on four public CD benchmarks. For model reproduction, the source code is released at https://github.com/AI-Zhpp/FTN.

In the context of dynamic evolution of workflow processes, the change region identifies the part of the old process from which migration to the new process is guaranteed to be inconsistent. However, this approach may lead to overestimated regions, incorrectly identifying migratable instances as non-migratable. This overestimation causes delays due to postponement of immediate migration. The paper analyzes this overestimation problem on a class of Petri nets models. Structural properties leading to conditions for minimal change regions and overestimations are developed resulting into classification of change regions into two types of change regions called Structural Change Regions and Perfect Structural Change Regions. Necessary and sufficient conditions for perfect regions are identified. The paper also discusses ways for computing the same in terms of structural properties of the old and the new processes.