Multi-Modal Building Change Detection for Large-Scale Small Changes: Benchmark and Baseline

Abstract

Change detection in optical remote sensing imagery is susceptible to illumination fluctuations, seasonal changes, and variations in surface land-cover materials. Relying solely on RGB imagery often produces pseudo-changes and leads to semantic ambiguity in features. Incorporating near-infrared (NIR) information provides heterogeneous physical cues that are complementary to visible light, thereby enhancing the discriminability of building materials and tiny structures while improving detection accuracy. However, existing multi-modal datasets generally lack high-resolution and accurately registered bi-temporal imagery, and current methods often fail to fully exploit the inherent heterogeneity between these modalities. To address these issues, we introduce the Large-scale Small-change Multi-modal Dataset (LSMD), a bi-temporal RGB-NIR building change detection benchmark dataset targeting small changes in realistic scenarios, providing a rigorous testing platform for evaluating multi-modal change detection methods in complex environments. Based on LSMD, we further propose the Multi-modal Spectral Complementarity Network (MSCNet) to achieve effective cross-modal feature fusion. MSCNet comprises three key components: the Neighborhood Context Enhancement Module (NCEM) to strengthen local spatial details, the Cross-modal Alignment and Interaction Module (CAIM) to enable deep interaction between RGB and NIR features, and the Saliency-aware Multisource Refinement Module (SMRM) to progressively refine fused features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MSCNet effectively leverages multi-modal information and consistently outperforms existing methods under multiple input configurations, validating its efficacy for fine-grained building change detection. The source code will be made publicly available at: https://github.com/AeroVILab-AHU/LSMD