Exploring Generalizable Pre-training for Real-world Change Detection via Geometric Estimation

As an essential procedure in earth observation system, change detection (CD) aims to reveal the spatial-temporal evolution of the observation regions. A key prerequisite for existing change detection algorithms is aligned geo-references between multi-temporal images by fine-grained registration. However, in the majority of real-world scenarios, a prior manual registration is required between the original images, which significantly increases the complexity of the CD workflow. In this paper, we proposed a self-supervision motivated CD framework with geometric estimation, called "MatchCD". Specifically, the proposed MatchCD framework utilizes the zero-shot capability to optimize the encoder with self-supervised contrastive representation, which is reused in the downstream image registration and change detection to simultaneously handle the bi-temporal unalignment and object change issues. Moreover, unlike the conventional change detection requiring segmenting the full-frame image into small patches, our MatchCD framework can directly process the original large-scale image (e.g., 6K*4K resolutions) with promising performance. The performance in multiple complex scenarios with significant geometric distortion demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed framework.

@article{zhao2025_2504.14306,
  title={ Exploring Generalizable Pre-training for Real-world Change Detection via Geometric Estimation },
  author={ Yitao Zhao and Sen Lei and Nanqing Liu and Heng-Chao Li and Turgay Celik and Qing Zhu },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.14306},
  year={ 2025 }
}