Fine-Grained Change Detection of Misaligned Scenes with Varied Illuminations

Abstract

Detecting fine-grained subtle changes among a scene is critically important in practice. Previous change detection methods, focusing on detecting large-scale significant changes, cannot do this well. This paper proposes a feasible end-to-end approach to this challenging problem. We start from active camera relocation that quickly relocates camera to nearly the same pose and position of the last time observation. To guarantee detection sensitivity and accuracy of minute changes, in an observation, we capture a group of images under multiple illuminations, which need only to be roughly aligned to the last time lighting conditions. Given two times observations, we formulate fine-grained change detection as a joint optimization problem of three related factors, i.e., normal-aware lighting difference, camera geometry correction flow, and real scene change mask. We solve the three factors in a coarse-to-fine manner and achieve reliable change decision by rank minimization. We build three real-world datasets to benchmark fine-grained change detection of misaligned scenes under varied multiple lighting conditions. Extensive experiments show the superior performance of our approach over state-of-the-art change detection methods and its ability to distinguish real scene changes from false ones caused by lighting variations.