Make Some Noise: Unsupervised Remote Sensing Change Detection Using Latent Space Perturbations

arXiv:2602.19881 · cs.CV, cs.AI · Submitted 2026-02-23 · Read on arXiv

cs.CV, cs.AI

Submitted: 2026-02-23

Updated: 2026-09-01

Comments: Accepted by IEEE TGRS: https://doi.org/10.1109/TGRS.2026.3730181

DOI: 10.1109/TGRS.2026.3730181

Project page: https://blaz-r.github.io/mason_ucd

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

The gist: Unsupervised remote sensing change detection (UCD) aims to localise changes between two images of the same region without relying on labelled training data.

Terminology

Abstract

Unsupervised remote sensing change detection (UCD) aims to localise changes between two images of the same region without relying on labelled training data. Most recent approaches either use a frozen foundation model in a training-free manner or train with synthetic changes generated in pixel space. Both strategies inherently rely on predefined assumptions about change types, typically introduced through handcrafted rules, external datasets, or auxiliary generative models. Due to these assumptions, such methods fail to generalise beyond a few change types, limiting their real-world usage, especially in rare or complex scenarios. To address this, we propose MaSoN (Make Some Noise), an end-to-end UCD framework that synthesises diverse changes directly in the latent feature space during training. It generates changes dynamically estimated from feature statistics of the target data, enabling diverse yet data-driven variation aligned with the target domain. Since synthesis happens in latent space, it also easily extends to new modalities, such as SAR and multispectral data. MaSoN generalises strongly across diverse change types and improves the average F1 score across five benchmarks by 14.1 percentage points. Project page: https://blaz-r.github.io/mason ucd/

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