Semantic segmentation and change detection are two fundamental challenges in remote sensing, requiring models to capture either spatial semantics or temporal differences from satellite imagery. Existing deep learning models often struggle with temporal inconsistencies or in capturing fine-grained spatial structures, require extensive pretraining, and offer limited interpretability - especially in real-world remote sensing scenarios. Recent advances in diffusion models show that Gaussian noise can be systematically leveraged to learn expressive data representations through denoising. Motivated by this, we investigate whether the noise process in diffusion models can be effectively utilized for discriminative tasks. We propose Noise2Map, a unified diffusion-based framework that repurposes the denoising process for fast, end-to-end discriminative learning. Unlike prior work that uses diffusion only for generation or feature extraction, Noise2Map directly predicts semantic or change maps using task-specific noise schedules and timestep conditioning, avoiding the costly sampling procedures of traditional diffusion models. The model is pretrained via self-supervised denoising and fine-tuned with supervision, enabling both interpretability and robustness. Our architecture supports both tasks (SS and CD) through a shared backbone and task-specific noise schedulers. Extensive evaluations on the SpaceNet7, WHU, and xView2 buildings damaged by wildfires datasets demonstrate that Noise2Map ranks on average 1st among seven models on semantic segmentation and 1st on change detection by a cross-dataset rank metric (average F1 primary, IoU tie-break). Ablation studies highlight the robustness of our model against different training noise schedulers and timestep control in the diffusion process, as well as the ability of the model to perform multi-task learning.
Modern deep learning models for change detection (CD) often struggle to explicitly represent task-relevant semantic differences. This paper proposes the Latent Difference Guidance (LDGuid) framework that explicitly learns and injects semantic differences into CD models. LDGuid deploys adversarial autoencoding to implement a difference embedding (DE) module. The DE module is pretrained via the information bottleneck method, restricting it to learn only task-relevant differences between pre- and post-event samples. The learned latent difference is then used as an explicit guidance signal in the CD model. We validate LDGuid by integrating it into U-Net, BIT, and AERNet baselines for CD and evaluating it on LEVIR-CD, WHU-CD, SVCD, and CaBuAr datasets. Experimental results show that LDGuid enhances segmentation performance across all benchmarks, with particularly remarkable gains in challenging settings affected by spectral noise. The results further highlight the ability of LDGuid in incorporating domain knowledge, such as task-specific spectral indices. Our findings suggest that semantic difference learning can drastically enhance the robustness of CD in remote sensing.
Change detection aims to identify semantic changes between remote sensing images. However, features from models are easily disturbed by non-semantic variations, such as illumination, shadows, and atmospheric changes, leading to false alarms and limited generalization in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose \textbf{SCDistill}, a framework for learning semantic-robust change detection via semantic-invariant self-distillation. First, to strengthen semantic consistency, we introduce a semantic-invariant self-distillation strategy that learns semantic robustness from perturbed yet semantically consistent data, empowering the change detector to extract disturbance-resistant features and achieve more reliable and accurate semantic change identification. Second, to expand paired data with non-semantic variations, we design a diffusion-based perturbation simulation pipeline that synthesizes complex environmental changes, enabling the model to explicitly learn to distinguish semantic changes from appearance-level fluctuations and reduce false alarms caused by non-semantic disturbances. These components promote robustness from data and representation perspectives, leading to synergistic performance gains. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SCDistill achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple semantic change detection benchmarks and exhibits strong generalization to binary change detection and change captioning tasks. Code is accessible at https://github.com/elecreak/SCDistill.
Remote sensing change detection requires both global reasoning across bitemporal images and precise localization of changed regions. However, dense attention is computationally expensive for high-resolution imagery, while conventional feature fusion and coarse decoding may inadequately separate genuine changes from appearance variations or preserve object boundaries. We present Bitemporal Mamba-Diffusion for Change Detection (BMD-CD), which combines temporally structured state-space modeling with logit-space diffusion refinement. BMD-CD converts deep bitemporal features into region tokens and arranges them in explicit temporal partitions before bidirectional state-space propagation. Its Bitemporal Ordered Mamba Operator enables long-range cross-temporal interaction with linear sequence complexity, while Orthogonal Feature Disentanglement forms a change-oriented output and a complementary rotated output using learned pairwise rotations and unchanged-region consistency. Multiscale decoding then produces coarse change logits, which are refined through a five-step Conditional Diffusion Decoder operating directly in logit space. Experiments on LEVIR-CD, WHU-CD, DSIFN-CD, CDD, and S2Looking demonstrate strong performance across diverse change-detection settings. BMD-CD achieves F1 scores of 93.7%, 96.0%, 97.8%, and 99.0% on the four standard benchmarks and improves 3-pixel Boundary-F1 to 87.7% and 91.4% on LEVIR-CD and WHU-CD, respectively. The full model requires 32.09 GFLOPs and 47 ms per 256 x 256 image pair, while also showing zero-shot transfer to ValaisCD and B-FLAIR-test. Our code is available at https://github.com/Aparup2139/Public_WACV/