Change-Agent: Toward Interactive Comprehensive Remote Sensing Change Interpretation and Analysis

Monitoring changes in the Earth’s surface is crucial for understanding natural processes and human impacts, necessitating precise and comprehensive interpretation methodologies. Remote sensing (RS) satellite imagery offers a unique perspective for monitoring these changes, leading to the emergence of RS image change interpretation (RSICI) as a significant research focus. Current RSICI technology encompasses change detection and change captioning, each with its limitations in providing comprehensive interpretation. To address this, we propose an interactive Change-Agent, which can follow user instructions to achieve comprehensive change interpretation and insightful analysis, such as change detection and change captioning, change object counting, and change cause analysis. The Change-Agent integrates a multilevel change interpretation (MCI) model as the eyes and a large language model (LLM) as the brain. The MCI model contains two branches of pixel-level change detection and semantic-level change captioning, in which the BI-temporal iterative interaction (BI3) layer is proposed to enhance the model’s discriminative feature representation capabilities. To support the training of the MCI model, we build the LEVIR-MCI dataset with a large number of change masks and captions of changes. Experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance of the MCI model in achieving both change detection and change description simultaneously and highlight the promising application value of our Change-Agent in facilitating comprehensive interpretation of surface changes, which opens up a new avenue for intelligent RS applications. To facilitate future research, we will make our dataset and codebase publicly available at <uri xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://github.com/Chen-Yang-Liu/Change-Agent</uri>.