Masks Can Talk: Extracting Structured Text Information from Single-Modal Images for Remote Sensing Change Detection

TL;DR

This paper introduces S2M, a framework that extracts structured textual information from change masks in remote sensing images, improving change detection without extra annotation.

Contribution

S2M automatically transcribes change masks into structured semantic quadruples, enabling dense multimodal supervision without additional annotation cost.

Findings

S2M outperforms existing multimodal methods on Gaza-Change-v2 dataset.

Structured textual features improve change detection accuracy.

Masks encode detailed change semantics that can be extracted for better analysis.

Abstract

Remote sensing change detection is pivotal for urban monitoring, disaster assessment, and environmental resource management. Yet, unimodal deep learning methods frequently confuse genuine semantic changes with visually similar but irrelevant variations. Recent multimodal approaches incorporate text as auxiliary supervision, but their descriptions are either semantically coarse and unstructured or model-generated and thus noisy. Critically, all of them overlook a simple fact: fine-grained change semantics are already implicitly encoded in the ground-truth mask labels that come standard with every change detection dataset. These masks know where the change happened, what the land-cover types were before and after, how the transition occurred, and how many objects were involved. In this paper, we propose S2M, a framework that obtains structured textual features directly from change labels at zero additional annotation cost. Specifically, each change region is automatically transcribed into a semantic quadruple (where, what, how, how many) and converted into several fixed-template text descriptions, providing precise, dense, and noise-free multimodal supervision. We adopts a two-stage training strategy to fine-tune on remote sensing imagery firstly for robust domain-specific representation, after which a multimodal decoder with a bi-directional contrastive loss is introduced to achieve deep alignment between visual features and structured textual embeddings. To validate our method, we construct Gaza-Change-v2, a new multi-class change detection (MCD) dataset about the Gaza Strip. On this MCD dataset, S2M achieves a Sek of 17.80\% and an F$_{\text{scd}}$ of 66.14\%, notably surpassing even multimodal methods that leverage large language models. Our work demonstrates that masks can indeed talk. They tell us exactly what, where, how, and how many changes have occurred.