A Cross-Spatial Differential Localization Network for Remote Sensing Change Captioning

Remote Sensing Image Change Captioning (RSICC) aims to generate natural language descriptions of changes in bi-temporal remote sensing images, providing more semantically interpretable results than conventional pixel-level change detection methods. However, existing approaches often rely on stacked Transformer modules, leading to suboptimal feature discrimination. Moreover, direct difference computation after feature extraction tends to retain task-irrelevant noise, limiting the model’s ability to capture meaningful changes. This study proposes a novel cross-spatial Transformer and symmetric difference localization network (CTSD-Net) for RSICC to address these limitations. The proposed Cross-Spatial Transformer adaptively enhances spatial-aware feature representations by guiding the model to focus on key regions across temporal images. Additionally, a hierarchical difference feature integration strategy is introduced to suppress noise by fusing multi-level differential features, while residual-connected high-level features serve as query vectors to facilitate bidirectional change representation learning. Finally, a causal Transformer decoder creates accurate descriptions by linking visual information with text. CTSD-Net achieved BLEU-4 scores of 66.32 and 73.84 on the LEVIR-CC and WHU-CDC datasets, respectively, outperforming existing methods in accurately locating change areas and describing them semantically. This study provides a promising solution for enhancing interpretability in remote sensing change analysis.