MaskChanger: A Transformer-Based Model Tailoring Change Detection with Mask Classification

Change detection in multi-temporal remote sensing data enables crucial urban analysis and environmental monitoring applications. However, complex factors like illumination variance and occlusion make robust automated change interpretation challenging. We propose MaskChanger - a novel deep learning paradigm tailored for satellite image change detection. Our method adapts the segmentation-specialized Mask2Former architecture by incorporating Siamese networks to extract features separately from bi-temporal images, while retaining the original mask transformer decoder. To our knowledge, this is the first study in which change detection is converted from the existing per-pixel classification approach into a mask classification approach. Evaluated on the LEVIR-CD benchmark of over 600 very high-resolution image pairs exhibiting real-world rural and urban changes, MaskChanger achieves Fl-Score of 91.96%, outperforming prior transformer-based change detection approaches.