# Robust Change Captioning in Remote Sensing: SECOND-CC Dataset and MModalCC Framework

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.10075 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.10075/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Jan 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5726/) (2014)
- [SPICE: Semantic Propositional Image Caption Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08822/) (2016)
- [Learning from Noisy Labels with Deep Neural Networks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08199/) (2020)
- [Symmetric Cross Entropy for Robust Learning with Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06112/) (2019)
- [EarthGPT: A Universal Multi-modal Large Language Model for Multi-sensor Image Comprehension in Remote Sensing Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16822/) (2024)
- [ChangeMamba: Remote Sensing Change Detection With Spatiotemporal State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03425/) (2024)
- [TEOChat: A Large Vision-Language Assistant for Temporal Earth Observation Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06234/) (2024)
- [ROUGE 2.0: Updated and Improved Measures for Evaluation of Summarization Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01937/) (2018)
- [Change-Agent: Towards Interactive Comprehensive Remote Sensing Change Interpretation and Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19646/) (2024)
- [Text2Earth: Unlocking Text-driven Remote Sensing Image Generation with a Global-Scale Dataset and a Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00895/) (2025)
- [Joint Spatio-Temporal Modeling for the Semantic Change Detection in Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05245/) (2022)
- [Changes to Captions: An Attentive Network for Remote Sensing Change Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01091/) (2023)
- [Semantic Change Detection with Asymmetric Siamese Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05687/) (2020)
- [Progressive Scale-aware Network for Remote sensing Image Change Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00355/) (2023)
- [Semantic-CC: Boosting Remote Sensing Image Change Captioning via Foundational Knowledge and Semantic Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14032/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Perception of Key Changes in Remote Sensing Image Change Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12612/) (2024)
- [GeoLLaVA: Efficient Fine-Tuned Vision-Language Models for Temporal Change Detection in Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.19552/) (2024)
- [CCExpert: Advancing MLLM Capability in Remote Sensing Change Captioning with Difference-Aware Integration and a Foundational Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.11360/) (2024)
- [ChangeMinds: Multi-task Framework for Detecting and Describing Changes in Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10047/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Earth-OneVision: Extending Remote Sensing Multimodal Large Language Models to More Sensor Modalities and Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.10819/) (2026)
- [RSEdit: Text-Guided Image Editing for Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.13708/) (2026)
- [UAV as Urban Construction Change Monitor: A New Benchmark and Change Captioning Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.04409/) (2026)
- [A Multi-Agent Feedback System for Detecting and Describing News Events in Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.12772/) (2026)
- [Beyond Pixel Diffs: Benchmarking Image Change Captioning for Web UI Visual Regression Testing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.01728/) (2026)
- [LBTCap: A Lightweight Bilateral Transformer for Real-Time Remote Sensing Image Change Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.03320/) (2026)
- [HIMEC: Directional Change Representation and Fixed-Interface Decoding for Remote Sensing Image Change Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.12502/) (2026)
- [MGRL-RSCC: Multi-Granularity Reward Reinforcement Learning for Fine-Grained Remote Sensing Change Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.26166/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Remote sensing change captioning (RSICC) aims to describe changes between bitemporal images in natural language. Existing methods often fail under challenges like illumination differences, viewpoint changes, blur effects, leading to inaccuracies, especially in no-change regions. Moreover, the images acquired at different spatial resolutions and have registration errors tend to affect the captions. To address these issues, we introduce SECOND-CC, a novel RSICC dataset featuring high-resolution RGB image pairs, semantic segmentation maps, and diverse real-world scenarios. SECOND-CC which contains 6,041 pairs of bitemporal RS images and 30,205 sentences describing the differences between images. Additionally, we propose MModalCC, a multimodal framework that integrates semantic and visual data using advanced attention mechanisms, including Cross-Modal Cross Attention (CMCA) and Multimodal Gated Cross Attention (MGCA). Detailed ablation studies and attention visualizations further demonstrate its effectiveness and ability to address RSICC challenges. Comprehensive experiments show that MModalCC outperforms state-of-the-art RSICC methods, including RSICCformer, Chg2Cap, and PSNet with +4.6% improvement on BLEU4 score and +9.6% improvement on CIDEr score. We will make our dataset and codebase publicly available to facilitate future research at https://github.com/ChangeCapsInRS/SecondCC