Fidelity-Diversity-Consistency (FDC): Data Pruning for Remote Sensing Change Detection

Abstract

Despite the success of data pruning (DP) in reducing training data sizes and improving downstream model performance in classification and segmentation tasks, its potential in remote sensing change detection remains unexplored. For the first time, we benchmark six representative DP methods across building- and forest-change datasets, CNN- and transformer-based models, and three pruning budgets, and show that existing baselines yield no reliable advantage over random selection. Notably, even the strongest evaluated baseline, Feature Diversity, is matched or exceeded by $\sim$33\% of randomly sampled subsets. To understand the underlying mechanism, we conduct a systematic regression study over 540 randomly sampled data subsets, characterizing each with four descriptors covering label statistics, image diversity, and feature-space geometry. Random Forest models show that \emph{change distribution fidelity} is the most prominent factor in determining the quality of change detection data subsets, a property absent from the existing pruning literature. Our analyses further show that pixel-wise image diversity and label-feature consistency are secondary factors. We translate these findings into Fidelity-Diversity-Consistency (FDC), a simple two-stage pruning method that shows consistent improvements over existing baselines across change detection benchmarks and backbones, especially at lower pruning ratios. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/ddydyd32/fidelity-diversity-consistency}{https://github.com/ddydyd32/fidelity-diversity-consistency}.