TaCo: Capturing Spatio-Temporal Semantic Consistency in Remote Sensing Change Detection

TL;DR

TaCo is a novel spatio-temporal semantic consistent network for remote sensing change detection that leverages textual semantics and joint constraints to improve accuracy without extra inference costs.

Contribution

It introduces a Text-guided Transition Generator and a spatio-temporal semantic joint constraint to enhance change detection performance.

Findings

Achieves state-of-the-art results on six public datasets.

Effectively models semantic transitions between bi-temporal features.

Improves change detection accuracy without additional inference overhead.

Abstract

Remote sensing change detection (RSCD) aims to identify surface changes across bi-temporal satellite images. Most previous methods rely solely on mask supervision, which effectively guides spatial localization but provides limited constraints on the temporal semantic transitions. Consequently, they often produce spatially coherent predictions while still suffering from unresolved semantic inconsistencies. To address this limitation, we propose TaCo, a spatio-temporal semantic consistent network, which enriches the existing mask-supervised framework with a spatio-temporal semantic joint constraint. TaCo conceptualizes change as a semantic transition between bi-temporal states, in which one temporal feature representation can be derived from the other via dedicated transition features. To realize this, we introduce a Text-guided Transition Generator that integrates textual semantics with bi-temporal visual features to construct the cross-temporal transition features. In addition, we propose a spatio-temporal semantic joint constraint consisting of bi-temporal reconstruct constraints and a transition constraint: the former enforces alignment between reconstructed and original features, while the latter enhances discrimination for changes. This design can yield substantial performance gains without introducing any additional computational overhead during inference. Extensive experiments on six public datasets, spanning both binary and semantic change detection tasks, demonstrate that TaCo consistently achieves SOTA performance.