# Semantic Change Detection with Asymmetric Siamese Networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.05687 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05687/

## Key facts

- Cited by 31 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 12 Oct 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Bi-Temporal Semantic Reasoning for the Semantic Change Detection in HR Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06103/) (2021)
- [DynamicEarth: How Far are We from Open-Vocabulary Change Detection?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12931/) (2025)
- [Building Bridges across Spatial and Temporal Resolutions: Reference-Based Super-Resolution via Change Priors and Conditional Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17460/) (2024)
- [SyntheWorld: A Large-Scale Synthetic Dataset for Land Cover Mapping and Building Change Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01907/) (2023)
- [DynamicVL: Benchmarking Multimodal Large Language Models for Dynamic City Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21076/) (2025)
- [Semantic-CD: Remote Sensing Image Semantic Change Detection towards Open-vocabulary Setting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.06808/) (2025)
- [A Change Detection Reality Check](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.06994/) (2024)
- [SAAN: Similarity-aware attention flow network for change detection with VHR remote sensing images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14570/) (2023)
- [RSBuilding: Towards General Remote Sensing Image Building Extraction and Change Detection with Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07564/) (2024)
- [Open-CD: A Comprehensive Toolbox for Change Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15317/) (2024)
- [SynRS3D: A Synthetic Dataset for Global 3D Semantic Understanding from Monocular Remote Sensing Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18151/) (2024)
- [Robust Change Captioning in Remote Sensing: SECOND-CC Dataset and MModalCC Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.10075/) (2025)
- [UniVCD: A New Method for Unsupervised Change Detection in the Open-Vocabulary Era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13089/) (2025)
- [Referring Change Detection in Remote Sensing Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.11719/) (2025)
- [VLRS-Bench: A Vision-Language Reasoning Benchmark for Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.07045/) (2026)
- [A Late-Stage Bitemporal Feature Fusion Network for Semantic Change Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10678/) (2024)
- [DGSolver: Diffusion Generalist Solver with Universal Posterior Sampling for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.21487/) (2025)
- [ViewDelta: Scaling Scene Change Detection through Text-Conditioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07612/) (2024)
- [RS-Prune: Training-Free Data Pruning at High Ratios for Efficient Remote Sensing Diffusion Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.23239/) (2025)
- [Exploring Foundation Models in Remote Sensing Image Change Detection: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07824/) (2024)
- [MSSDF: Modality-Shared Self-supervised Distillation for High-Resolution Multi-modal Remote Sensing Image Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09327/) (2025)
- [ChangeBridge: Spatiotemporal Image Generation with Multimodal Controls for Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04678/) (2025)
- [SeFi-CD: A Semantic First Change Detection Paradigm That Can Detect Any Change You Want](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09874/) (2024)
- [Detect Changes like Humans: Incorporating Semantic Priors for Improved Change Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16918/) (2024)
- [Text-conditioned State Space Model For Domain-generalized Change Detection Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08974/) (2025)
- [ReasonCD: A Multimodal Reasoning Large Model for Implicit Change-of-Interest Semantic Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.19354/) (2025)
- [Specialized Change Detection using Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06644/) (2024)
- [Operational Change Detection for Geographical Information: Overview and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14109/) (2025)
- [ChangeFlow -- Latent Rectified Flow for Change Detection in Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15375/) (2026)
- [Learning to Balance: Decoupled Siamese Diffusion Transformer for Reference-Based Remote Sensing Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.17980/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Given two multi-temporal aerial images, semantic change detection aims to locate the land-cover variations and identify their change types with pixel-wise boundaries. This problem is vital in many earth vision related tasks, such as precise urban planning and natural resource management. Existing state-of-the-art algorithms mainly identify the changed pixels by applying homogeneous operations on each input image and comparing the extracted features. However, in changed regions, totally different land-cover distributions often require heterogeneous features extraction procedures w.r.t each input. In this paper, we present an asymmetric siamese network (ASN) to locate and identify semantic changes through feature pairs obtained from modules of widely different structures, which involve areas of various sizes and apply different quantities of parameters to factor in the discrepancy across different land-cover distributions. To better train and evaluate our model, we create a large-scale well-annotated SEmantic Change detectiON Dataset (SECOND), while an Adaptive Threshold Learning (ATL) module and a Separated Kappa (SeK) coefficient are proposed to alleviate the influences of label imbalance in model training and evaluation. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model can stably outperform the state-of-the-art algorithms with different encoder backbones.