Change3D: Revisiting Change Detection and Captioning from A Video Modeling Perspective

Abstract: In this paper, we present Change3D, a framework that reconceptualizes the change detection and captioning tasks through video modeling. Recent methods have achieved remarkable success by regarding each pair of bi-temporal images as separate frames. They employ a shared-weight image encoder to extract spatial features and then use a change extractor to capture differences between the two images. However, image feature encoding, being a task-agnostic process, cannot attend to changed regions effectively. Furthermore, different change extractors designed for various change detection and captioning tasks make it difficult to have a unified framework. To tackle these challenges, Change3D regards the bi-temporal images as comprising two frames akin to a tiny video. By integrating learnable perception frames between the bi-temporal images, a video encoder enables the perception frames to interact with the images directly and perceive their differences. Therefore, we can get rid of the intricate change extractors, providing a unified framework for different change detection and captioning tasks. We verify Change3D on multiple tasks, encompassing change detection (including binary change detection, semantic change detection, and building damage assessment) and change captioning, across eight standard benchmarks. Without bells and whistles, this simple yet effective framework can achieve superior performance with an ultra-light video model comprising only ~6%-13% of the parameters and ~8%-34% of the FLOPs compared to state-of-the-art methods. We hope that Change3D could be an alternative to 2D-based models and facilitate future research.