Domain-Incremental Remote Sensing Change Detection via Difference-Guided Adaptation and Frequency-Decoupled Distillation

Abstract

Remote sensing change detection (RSCD) models are prone to catastrophic forgetting when incrementally adapted to new domains. Existing domain-incremental learning (DIL) methods mainly preserve image-level representations but often overlook bitemporal discrepancy cues, which are critical for robust change detection under domain shifts. To address this limitation, we propose DG-FDD, a domain-incremental change detection framework that integrates Difference-Guided Adaptation and Frequency-Decoupled Distillation. Specifically, the Difference-Guided Dynamic Adapter (DGDA) models bitemporal feature discrepancies to promote change-aware feature adaptation and reduce domain-specific interference. Meanwhile, the Frequency-Decoupled Knowledge Distillation strategy with Cross-domain Synthesis (FDKD-CS) separates structural information from domain style in the frequency domain, enabling stable knowledge transfer without historical data. Extensive experiments on three public high-resolution RSCD datasets under two- and three-domain incremental protocols demonstrate that DG-FDD effectively mitigates catastrophic forgetting. Compared with independently trained single-task models, DG-FDD records mean relative changes in F1 and IoU of only -0.23% and -0.45%, respectively, across six two-domain sequences, and -0.69% and -1.31%, respectively, across the three evaluated three-domain sequences. These results indicate a favorable stability-plasticity balance between historical knowledge retention and new-domain adaptation in continual cross-domain change detection.