cs.CVJul 21, 2026

Learning Semantic-Robust Change Detection via Semantic-Invariant Self-Distillation

Authors: Jiuhe QuYingping LiangYing Fu

Organizations: Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China

Abstract

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.

Explore similar work

Jun 8, 2026cs.CV

SemDINO: A DINOv3-Driven Network for Cross-Temporal Semantic Alignment in Change Detection

Semantic change detection (SCD) aims to simultaneously locate land-cover changes and identify semantic categories before and after transition. However, existing methods suffer from insufficient cross-temporal alignment, weak multi-scale representation, and poor robustness to pseudo-changes caused by illumination, season, and registration noise. To address these issues, we propose a novel end-to-end semantic change detection network named SemDINO, which integrates a dual-branch encoder, multi-scale temporal interaction, semantic purification, change enhancement, and decoupled multi-task prediction into a unified framework. Specifically, we construct a dual-branch encoder that combines a CNN backbone and frozen DINOv3 features via gated pyramid fusion, enabling rich multi-scale semantic representation. Then, a multi-scale temporal bidirectional transformer interaction (M-TBTT) module is proposed to achieve global cross-temporal feature alignment and information interaction. To further enhance genuine changes and suppress pseudo-variations, we introduce semantic purification (SCP), bidirectional change enhancement (BiChangeEnhance), and multi-scale change enhancement (MCE) modules collaboratively. Finally, a multi-branch CD prediction head is designed to jointly output binary change mask, bi-temporal semantic maps, and edge constraint. Extensive experiments on public remote sensing CD datasets demonstrate that SemDINO achieves superior performance and generalization ability against state-of-the-art methods, especially in complex scenarios with interference factors.
Xinyu Tong, Meihua Zhou, Jinxiao Sun +2
May 28, 2026cs.CV

OmniCD: A Foundational Framework for Remote Sensing Image Change Detection Guided by Multimodal Semantics

Change detection (CD) in remote sensing is vital for applications such as urban monitoring and disaster assessment, yet traditional methods struggle with generalization across diverse scenarios. We present OmniCD, a foundational framework that unifies and enhances remote sensing CD through multimodal semantic guidance. OmniCD incorporates image and text prompts -- such as textual descriptions, semantic maps, and geospatial metadata -- into a unified architecture, supporting tasks from binary CD to zero-shot semantic change understanding. The framework integrates a hierarchical scene retrieval module and a change detection module, reinforced by a style disentanglement mechanism for improved cross-domain robustness. We further introduce RSITCD, a large-scale multimodal dataset with 300K+ annotated image-text pairs. Extensive experiments show that OmniCD achieves state-of-the-art performance across benchmarks, demonstrating strong adaptability and setting a solid foundation for general-purpose CD systems in remote sensing.
Chenhao Sun
Jun 18, 2026cs.CV

ReA-OVCD: Training-Free Open-Vocabulary Change Detection via Semantic-Spatial Reliability Assessment

Unlike traditional remote sensing change detection that relies on predefined categories, Open-Vocabulary Change Detection (OVCD) identifies land cover changes flexibly using arbitrary text prompts. However, most existing OVCD methods rely on instance-level matching for stable correspondence but may overlook fine-grained variations (e.g., partial building extensions). Dense pixel-level comparison is more flexible, yet direct semantic comparison often produces unreliable candidate changes due to semantic ambiguity and spatial inconsistency. To this end, we propose ReA-OVCD, an efficient training-free framework that revisits pixel-level OVCD from a reliability assessment perspective. It first derives candidate change regions from pixel-wise semantic discrepancies to retain flexible localization. Instead of directly trusting these candidates, ReA-OVCD applies a two-stage semantic-spatial reliability assessment. The semantic stage evaluates whether a label discrepancy is supported by meaningful distributional and response-level changes, while the spatial stage validates whether a candidate region contains stable interior evidence rather than only boundary-induced responses. Extensive experiments across LEVIR-CD, WHU-CD, DSIFN, and SECOND show that the proposed framework improves the reliability of pixel-level OVCD and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieving F1C\mathrm{F}_{1}^{C} improvements of 3.54% to 8.45% while maintaining superior computational efficiency. The code is available at \href{https://github.com/Funny0101/ReA-OVCD}{https://github.com/Funny0101/ReA-OVCD}.
Hongming Zhu, Huaji Chen, Bowen Du +2