UniChange: Unifying Change Detection with Multimodal Large Language Model

Change detection (CD) is a fundamental task for monitoring and analysing land cover dynamics. While recent high performance models and high quality datasets have significantly advanced the field, a critical limitation persists. Current models typically acquire limited knowledge from single-type annotated data and cannot concurrently leverage diverse binary change detection (BCD) and semantic change detection (SCD) datasets. This constraint leads to poor generalisation and limited versatility. The recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) introduce new possibilities for a unified CD framework. We leverage the language priors and unification capabilities of MLLMs to develop UniChange, the first MLLM-based unified change detection model. UniChange integrates generative language abilities with specialised CD functionalities. We introduce three special tokens: [T1], [T2], and [CHANGE], utilising their embeddings as the key to query variations. This approach successfully accommodates both BCD and SCD tasks. Furthermore, UniChange utilises text prompts to guide the identification of change categories, eliminating the reliance on predefined classification heads. This design allows UniChange to effectively acquire knowledge from multi-source datasets, even when their class definitions conflict. Experiments on four public benchmarks (WHU-CD, S2Looking, LEVIR-CD+, and SECOND) demonstrate SOTA performance, achieving IoU scores of 90.41, 53.04, 78.87, and 57.62, respectively, surpassing all previous methods.