Bridging Supervision Gaps: A Unified Framework for Remote Sensing Change Detection
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.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2601.17747,
title = {Bridging Supervision Gaps: A Unified Framework for Remote Sensing Change Detection},
author = {Kaixuan Jiang and Chen Wu and Zhenghui Zhao and Chengxi Han and Haonan Guo and Hongruixuan Chen},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.17747},
year = {2026}
}