SCD-SAM: Adapting Segment Anything Model for Semantic Change Detection in Remote Sensing Imagery

Semantic change detection (SCD) has gradually emerged as a prominent research focus in remote sensing image processing due to its critical role in earth observation applications. In view of its powerful semantic-driven feature extraction capability, the Segment Anything Model (SAM) has demonstrated its suitability across various visual scenes. However, it suffers from significant performance degradation when confronted with remote sensing images, especially those containing various ground objects that possess significant inter-class similarity and substantial intra-class variations. To address the above issues, we propose SCD-SAM, aiming to leverage the potent visual recognition capabilities of SAM for enhanced accuracy and robustness in SCD. Specifically, we introduce a contextual semantic change-aware dual encoder that combines MobileSAM and CNN to extract progressive semantic change features in parallel, and inject local features into the MobileSAM encoder through depth feature interaction to compensate for the Transformer’s limitations in perceiving local semantic details. Besides, in order to utilize the strong visual feature extraction capability of MobileSAM in remote sensing images, we propose a semantic adaptor that aggregates semantic-oriented information about changing objects. To better integrate the extracted contextual semantic information, we devise a progressive feature aggregation dual decoder that aggregates binary change features and semantic change features respectively, alleviating the semantic gap across different scales. The quantitative and visual results show that SCD-SAM outperforms the state-of-the-art SCD methods on publicly open SCD datasets (e.g., SECOND-CD and Landsat-CD). The code will be made available at https://github.com/yzygit1230/SCD-SAM.