Bridging Supervision Gaps: A Unified Framework for Remote Sensing Change Detection

TL;DR

This paper introduces UniCD, a unified framework for remote sensing change detection that effectively integrates supervised, weakly-supervised, and unsupervised learning to improve accuracy across diverse annotation scenarios.

Contribution

UniCD is a novel coupled architecture that unifies different supervision signals through shared encoders and specialized modules, advancing change detection capabilities.

Findings

Achieves 12.72% accuracy improvement on LEVIR-CD in weakly-supervised scenarios.

Surpasses state-of-the-art by 12.37% in unsupervised change detection.

Demonstrates strong performance across multiple datasets and supervision types.

Abstract

Change detection (CD) aims to identify surface changes from multi-temporal remote sensing imagery. In real-world scenarios, Pixel-level change labels are expensive to acquire, and existing models struggle to adapt to scenarios with diverse annotation availability. To tackle this challenge, we propose a unified change detection framework (UniCD), which collaboratively handles supervised, weakly-supervised, and unsupervised tasks through a coupled architecture. UniCD eliminates architectural barriers through a shared encoder and multi-branch collaborative learning mechanism, achieving deep coupling of heterogeneous supervision signals. Specifically, UniCD consists of three supervision-specific branches. In the supervision branch, UniCD introduces the spatial-temporal awareness module (STAM), achieving efficient synergistic fusion of bi-temporal features. In the weakly-supervised branch, we construct change representation regularization (CRR), which steers model convergence from coarse-grained activations toward coherent and separable change modeling. In the unsupervised branch, we propose semantic prior-driven change inference (SPCI), which transforms unsupervised tasks into controlled weakly-supervised path optimization. Experiments on mainstream datasets demonstrate that UniCD achieves optimal performance across three tasks. It exhibits significant accuracy improvements in weakly and unsupervised scenarios, surpassing current state-of-the-art by 12.72% and 12.37% on LEVIR-CD, respectively.