TaCo: Capturing Spatio-Temporal Semantic Consistency in Remote Sensing Change Detection
This work addresses semantic inconsistency issues in remote sensing change detection, which is crucial for applications like environmental monitoring, but it is incremental as it builds upon existing mask-supervised frameworks.
The paper tackles the problem of semantic inconsistencies in remote sensing change detection by proposing TaCo, a network that adds spatio-temporal semantic constraints to mask supervision, resulting in state-of-the-art performance across six datasets for binary and semantic change detection tasks.
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.