Papers › SemiCD-VL: Visual-Language Model Guidance Makes Better Semi-supervised Change Detector

SemiCD-VL: Visual-Language Model Guidance Makes Better Semi-supervised Change Detector

8 May 2024arXiv:2405.04788archive 2025-07-28

Kaiyu Li, Xiangyong Cao, Yupeng Deng, Jiayi Song, Junmin Liu, Deyu Meng, Zhi Wang

Change Detection (CD) aims to identify pixels with semantic changes between images. However, annotating massive numbers of pixel-level images is labor-intensive and costly, especially for multi-temporal images, which require pixel-wise comparisons by human experts. Considering the excellent performance of visual language models (VLMs) for zero-shot, open-vocabulary, etc. with prompt-based reasoning, it is promising to utilize VLMs to make better CD under limited labeled data. In this paper, we propose a VLM guidance-based semi-supervised CD method, namely SemiCD-VL. The insight of SemiCD-VL is to synthesize free change labels using VLMs to provide additional supervision signals for unlabeled data. However, almost all current VLMs are designed for single-temporal images and cannot be directly applied to bi- or multi-temporal images. Motivated by this, we first propose a VLM-based mixed change event generation (CEG) strategy to yield pseudo labels for unlabeled CD data. Since the additional supervised signals provided by these VLM-driven pseudo labels may conflict with the pseudo labels from the consistency regularization paradigm (e.g. FixMatch), we propose the dual projection head for de-entangling different signal sources. Further, we explicitly decouple the bi-temporal images semantic representation through two auxiliary segmentation decoders, which are also guided by VLM. Finally, to make the model more adequately capture change representations, we introduce metric-aware supervision by feature-level contrastive loss in auxiliary branches. Extensive experiments show the advantage of SemiCD-VL. For instance, SemiCD-VL improves the FixMatch baseline by +5.3 IoU on WHU-CD and by +2.4 IoU on LEVIR-CD with 5% labels. In addition, our CEG strategy, in an un-supervised manner, can achieve performance far superior to state-of-the-art un-supervised CD methods.

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Code

likyoo/diffmatch officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report
likyoo/semicd-vl officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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Tasks

Change DetectionLanguage ModelingLanguage ModellingSemi-supervised Change Detection

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Semi-supervised Change Detection LEVIR-CD - 10% labeled data DiffMatch IoU 82.6 #3 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Semi-supervised Change Detection LEVIR-CD - 5% labeled data DiffMatch IoU 81.9 #2 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Semi-supervised Change Detection WHU - 10% labeled data DiffMatch IoU 83.2 #1 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Semi-supervised Change Detection WHU - 5% labeled data DiffMatch IoU 81.8 #1 of 4 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

FixMatch

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