Change-Agent: Towards 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 satellite imagery offers a unique perspective for monitoring these changes, leading to the emergence of remote sensing 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 according to user instructions, such as change detection and change captioning, change object counting, change cause analysis, etc. The Change-Agent integrates a multi-level 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 multiple BI-temporal Iterative Interaction (BI3) layers utilize Local Perception Enhancement (LPE) and the Global Difference Fusion Attention (GDFA) modules 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. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed MCI model and highlight the promising potential of our Change-Agent in facilitating comprehensive and intelligent interpretation of surface changes. To facilitate future research, we will make our dataset and codebase of the MCI model and Change-Agent publicly available at https://github.com/Chen-Yang-Liu/Change-Agent