Recurrent Semantic Change Detection in VHR Remote Sensing Images Using Visual Foundation Models

Zhang, J. and Ding, L. and Zhou, T. and Wang, J. and Atkinson, P.M. and Bruzzone, L. (2025) Recurrent Semantic Change Detection in VHR Remote Sensing Images Using Visual Foundation Models. IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, 63: 5402314. ISSN 0196-2892

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Abstract

Semantic change detection (SCD) involves the simultaneous extraction of changed regions and their corresponding semantic classifications (pre- and post-change) in remote sensing images (RSIs). Despite recent advancements in vision foundation models (VFMs), the fast-segment anything model has demonstrated insufficient performance in SCD. In this article, we propose a novel VFMs architecture for SCD, designated as VFM-ReSCD. This architecture integrates a side adapter (SA) into the VFM-ReSCD to fine-tune the fast segment anything model (FastSAM) network, enabling zero-shot transfer to novel image distributions and tasks. This enhancement facilitates the extraction of spatial features from very high-resolution (VHR) RSIs. Moreover, we introduce a recurrent neural network (RNN) to model semantic correlation and capture feature changes. We evaluated the proposed methodology on two benchmark datasets. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performances over existing approaches and outperforms other CNN-based methods on two RSI datasets.