Image based detection of geometric changes in urban environments

Abstract

In this paper, we propose an efficient technique to detect changes in the geometry of an urban environment using some images observing its current state. The proposed method can be used to significantly optimize the process of updating the 3D model of a city changing over time, by restricting this process to only those areas where changes are detected. With this application in mind, we designed our algorithm to specifically detect only structural changes in the environment, ignoring any changes in its appearance, and ignoring also all the changes which are not relevant for update purposes, such as cars, people etc. As a by-product, the algorithm also provides a coarse geometry of the detected changes. The performance of the proposed method was tested on four different kinds of urban environments and compared with two alternative techniques.