City-scale Scene Change Detection using Point Clouds
This addresses the problem of monitoring urban infrastructure changes for city planners or autonomous systems, but it is incremental as it builds on existing point cloud and registration techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of detecting structural changes in a city using point clouds from images captured at different times, and the result is an effective method that handles viewpoint and illumination differences.
We propose a method for detecting structural changes in a city using images captured from vehicular mounted cameras over traversals at two different times. We first generate 3D point clouds for each traversal from the images and approximate GNSS/INS readings using Structure-from-Motion (SfM). A direct comparison of the two point clouds for change detection is not ideal due to inaccurate geo-location information and possible drifts in the SfM. To circumvent this problem, we propose a deep learning-based non-rigid registration on the point clouds which allows us to compare the point clouds for structural change detection in the scene. Furthermore, we introduce a dual thresholding check and post-processing step to enhance the robustness of our method. We collect two datasets for the evaluation of our approach. Experiments show that our method is able to detect scene changes effectively, even in the presence of viewpoint and illumination differences.