ReA-OVCD: Training-Free Open-Vocabulary Change Detection via Semantic-Spatial Reliability Assessment

Unlike traditional remote sensing change detection that relies on predefined categories, Open-Vocabulary Change Detection (OVCD) identifies land cover changes flexibly using arbitrary text prompts. However, most existing OVCD methods rely on instance-level matching for stable correspondence but may overlook fine-grained variations (e.g., partial building extensions). Dense pixel-level comparison is more flexible, yet direct semantic comparison often produces unreliable candidate changes due to semantic ambiguity and spatial inconsistency. To this end, we propose ReA-OVCD, an efficient training-free framework that revisits pixel-level OVCD from a reliability assessment perspective. It first derives candidate change regions from pixel-wise semantic discrepancies to retain flexible localization. Instead of directly trusting these candidates, ReA-OVCD applies a two-stage semantic-spatial reliability assessment. The semantic stage evaluates whether a label discrepancy is supported by meaningful distributional and response-level changes, while the spatial stage validates whether a candidate region contains stable interior evidence rather than only boundary-induced responses. Extensive experiments across LEVIR-CD, WHU-CD, DSIFN, and SECOND show that the proposed framework improves the reliability of pixel-level OVCD and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieving F1C improvements of 3.54% to 8.45% while maintaining superior computational efficiency. The code is available at hrefhttps://github.com/Funny0101/ReA-OVCDhttps://github.com/Funny0101/ReA-OVCD.