Edge Knowledge Distillation Guided Lightweight Change Detection Network

Abstract

Abstract. Deep-learning methods dominate remote-sensing change detection (CD), yet state-of-the-art models remain parameter-heavy and struggle with crisp boundaries, limiting their use on edge devices. We present LEDGNet, a Lightweight, Edge-knowledge- Distillation-Guided CD Network, that reconciles accuracy, boundary fidelity, and efficiency. LEDGNet integrates three purpose-built components: 1) an Edge Distillation Module that mines multi-scale boundary cues from a high-capacity teacher and transfers them to a compact student through an edge-aware loss; 2) StarLite, a depth-wise separable encoder that preserves fine spatial detail while minimizing floating-point operations; and 3) LiteDecoder, an inexpensive feature-fusion head that restores full resolution without bulky up-sampling. This design halves the parameters and inference time of mainstream fine-grained CD networks while enhancing edge sharpness. On the CDD and LEVIR-CD benchmarks, LEDGNet achieves competitive F1 performance while maintaining a compact footprint of 20.58 M parameters and 35.18 G FLOPs. With an inference time of 255 ms, it strikes a balance between resource consumption and detection efficiency, making it well-suited for high-efficiency remote sensing monitoring.