ChangeFlow -- Latent Rectified Flow for Change Detection in Remote Sensing

Remote sensing change detection (RSCD) localises changes between two images of the same geographic region. Most state-of-the-art methods are trained with a per-pixel discriminative objective that classifies each spatial location independently. In this scenario, the predicted changed region is not modelled as a coherent whole, so predictions tend to be spatially fragmented. Generative modelling offers a principled solution: by learning a distribution over plausible change masks, it treats the mask as a single object and encourages global consistency. Yet existing generative RSCD methods lag behind strong discriminative baselines, held back by costly pixel-space generation and overly complex conditioning. We introduce ChangeFlow, which reformulates change detection as the generative synthesis of change masks in a compact latent space via rectified flow, guided by a structured yet lightweight bi-temporal conditioning signal. Changeflow yields spatially coherent predictions without sacrificing efficiency: across four binary benchmarks, SYSU, LEVIR, CLCD, and OSCD, ChangeFlow achieves an average F1 of 80.4%, a 1.3-point gain over the previous best with better efficiency. It also extends to semantic change detection, setting a new state-of-the-art 65.9 Fscd on SECOND. Project page: https://blaz-r.github.io/changeflowcd