ChangeQuery: Advancing Remote Sensing Change Analysis for Natural and Human-Induced Disasters from Visual Detection to Semantic Understanding

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Sun, Dongwei, Yao, Jing, Wei, Kan, Cao, Xiangyong, Wu, Chen, Zhao, Zhenghui, Ghamisi, Pedram, Zhou, Jun, Benediktsson, Jón Atli
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866910162277629952
author Sun, Dongwei
Yao, Jing
Wei, Kan
Cao, Xiangyong
Wu, Chen
Zhao, Zhenghui
Ghamisi, Pedram
Zhou, Jun
Benediktsson, Jón Atli
author_facet Sun, Dongwei
Yao, Jing
Wei, Kan
Cao, Xiangyong
Wu, Chen
Zhao, Zhenghui
Ghamisi, Pedram
Zhou, Jun
Benediktsson, Jón Atli
contents Rapid situational awareness is critical in post-disaster response. While remote sensing damage assessment is evolving from pixel-level change detection to high-level semantic analysis, existing vision-language methodologies still struggle to provide actionable intelligence for complex strategic queries. They remain severely constrained by unimodal optical dependence, a prevailing bias towards natural disasters, and a fundamental lack of grounded interactivity. To address these limitations, we present ChangeQuery, a unified multimodal framework designed for comprehensive, all-weather disaster situation awareness. To overcome modality constraints and scenario biases, we construct the Disaster-Induced Change Query (DICQ) dataset, a large-scale benchmark coupling pre-event optical semantics with post-event SAR structural features across a balanced distribution of natural catastrophes and armed conflicts. Furthermore, to provide the high-quality supervision required for interactive reasoning, we propose a novel Automated Semantic Annotation Pipeline. Adhering to a ``statistics-first, generation-later'' paradigm, this engine automatically transforms raw segmentation masks into grounded, hierarchical instruction sets, effectively equipping the model with fine-grained spatial and quantitative awareness. Trained on this structured data, the ChangeQuery architecture operates as an interactive disaster analyst. It supports multi-task reasoning driven by diverse user queries, delivering precise damage quantification, region-specific descriptions, and holistic post-disaster summaries. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ChangeQuery establishes a new state-of-the-art, providing a robust and interpretable solution for complex disaster monitoring. The code is available at \href{https://sundongwei.github.io/changequery/}{https://sundongwei.github.io/changequery/}.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_22333
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ChangeQuery: Advancing Remote Sensing Change Analysis for Natural and Human-Induced Disasters from Visual Detection to Semantic Understanding
Sun, Dongwei
Yao, Jing
Wei, Kan
Cao, Xiangyong
Wu, Chen
Zhao, Zhenghui
Ghamisi, Pedram
Zhou, Jun
Benediktsson, Jón Atli
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Rapid situational awareness is critical in post-disaster response. While remote sensing damage assessment is evolving from pixel-level change detection to high-level semantic analysis, existing vision-language methodologies still struggle to provide actionable intelligence for complex strategic queries. They remain severely constrained by unimodal optical dependence, a prevailing bias towards natural disasters, and a fundamental lack of grounded interactivity. To address these limitations, we present ChangeQuery, a unified multimodal framework designed for comprehensive, all-weather disaster situation awareness. To overcome modality constraints and scenario biases, we construct the Disaster-Induced Change Query (DICQ) dataset, a large-scale benchmark coupling pre-event optical semantics with post-event SAR structural features across a balanced distribution of natural catastrophes and armed conflicts. Furthermore, to provide the high-quality supervision required for interactive reasoning, we propose a novel Automated Semantic Annotation Pipeline. Adhering to a ``statistics-first, generation-later'' paradigm, this engine automatically transforms raw segmentation masks into grounded, hierarchical instruction sets, effectively equipping the model with fine-grained spatial and quantitative awareness. Trained on this structured data, the ChangeQuery architecture operates as an interactive disaster analyst. It supports multi-task reasoning driven by diverse user queries, delivering precise damage quantification, region-specific descriptions, and holistic post-disaster summaries. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ChangeQuery establishes a new state-of-the-art, providing a robust and interpretable solution for complex disaster monitoring. The code is available at \href{https://sundongwei.github.io/changequery/}{https://sundongwei.github.io/changequery/}.
title ChangeQuery: Advancing Remote Sensing Change Analysis for Natural and Human-Induced Disasters from Visual Detection to Semantic Understanding
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.22333