EMPLACE: Self-Supervised Urban Scene Change Detection

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Alpherts, Tim, Ghebreab, Sennay, van Noord, Nanne
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Alpherts, Tim
Ghebreab, Sennay
van Noord, Nanne
author_facet Alpherts, Tim
Ghebreab, Sennay
van Noord, Nanne
contents Urban change is a constant process that influences the perception of neighbourhoods and the lives of the people within them. The field of Urban Scene Change Detection (USCD) aims to capture changes in street scenes using computer vision and can help raise awareness of changes that make it possible to better understand the city and its residents. Traditionally, the field of USCD has used supervised methods with small scale datasets. This constrains methods when applied to new cities, as it requires labour-intensive labeling processes and forces a priori definitions of relevant change. In this paper we introduce AC-1M the largest USCD dataset by far of over 1.1M images, together with EMPLACE, a self-supervising method to train a Vision Transformer using our adaptive triplet loss. We show EMPLACE outperforms SOTA methods both as a pre-training method for linear fine-tuning as well as a zero-shot setting. Lastly, in a case study of Amsterdam, we show that we are able to detect both small and large changes throughout the city and that changes uncovered by EMPLACE, depending on size, correlate with housing prices - which in turn is indicative of inequity.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_17716
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle EMPLACE: Self-Supervised Urban Scene Change Detection
Alpherts, Tim
Ghebreab, Sennay
van Noord, Nanne
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Urban change is a constant process that influences the perception of neighbourhoods and the lives of the people within them. The field of Urban Scene Change Detection (USCD) aims to capture changes in street scenes using computer vision and can help raise awareness of changes that make it possible to better understand the city and its residents. Traditionally, the field of USCD has used supervised methods with small scale datasets. This constrains methods when applied to new cities, as it requires labour-intensive labeling processes and forces a priori definitions of relevant change. In this paper we introduce AC-1M the largest USCD dataset by far of over 1.1M images, together with EMPLACE, a self-supervising method to train a Vision Transformer using our adaptive triplet loss. We show EMPLACE outperforms SOTA methods both as a pre-training method for linear fine-tuning as well as a zero-shot setting. Lastly, in a case study of Amsterdam, we show that we are able to detect both small and large changes throughout the city and that changes uncovered by EMPLACE, depending on size, correlate with housing prices - which in turn is indicative of inequity.
title EMPLACE: Self-Supervised Urban Scene Change Detection
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.17716