AdaptOVCD: Training-Free Open-Vocabulary Remote Sensing Change Detection via Adaptive Information Fusion

TL;DR

AdaptOVCD introduces a training-free, multi-level information fusion framework for open-vocabulary remote sensing change detection, enabling zero-shot detection of arbitrary changes with high accuracy and generalization.

Contribution

It proposes a novel training-free architecture that integrates multi-level information fusion and adaptive designs to improve open-vocabulary change detection in remote sensing.

Findings

Achieves 84.89% of fully-supervised performance in cross-dataset tests.

Outperforms existing training-free change detection methods.

Demonstrates strong zero-shot and generalization capabilities.

Abstract

Remote sensing change detection plays a pivotal role in domains such as environmental monitoring, urban planning, and disaster assessment. However, existing methods typically rely on predefined categories and large-scale pixel-level annotations, which limit their generalization and applicability in open-world scenarios. To address these limitations, this paper proposes AdaptOVCD, a training-free Open-Vocabulary Change Detection (OVCD) architecture based on dual-dimensional multi-level information fusion. The framework integrates multi-level information fusion across data, feature, and decision levels vertically while incorporating targeted adaptive designs horizontally, achieving deep synergy among heterogeneous pre-trained models to effectively mitigate error propagation. Specifically, (1) at the data level, Adaptive Radiometric Alignment (ARA) fuses radiometric statistics with original texture features and synergizes with SAM-HQ to achieve radiometrically consistent segmentation; (2) at the feature level, Adaptive Change Thresholding (ACT) combines global difference distributions with edge structure priors and leverages DINOv3 to achieve robust change detection; (3) at the decision level, Adaptive Confidence Filtering (ACF) integrates semantic confidence with spatial constraints and collaborates with DGTRS-CLIP to achieve high-confidence semantic identification. Comprehensive evaluations across nine scenarios demonstrate that AdaptOVCD detects arbitrary category changes in a zero-shot manner, significantly outperforming existing training-free methods. Meanwhile, it achieves 84.89\% of the fully-supervised performance upper bound in cross-dataset evaluations and exhibits superior generalization capabilities. The code is available at https://github.com/Dmygithub/AdaptOVCD.