From Pixels to Primitives: Scene Change Detection in 3D Gaussian Splatting

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Galappaththige, Chamuditha Jayanga, Lai, Jason, Patten, Timothy, Dansereau, Donald, Suenderhauf, Niko, Miller, Dimity
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Galappaththige, Chamuditha Jayanga
Lai, Jason
Patten, Timothy
Dansereau, Donald
Suenderhauf, Niko
Miller, Dimity
author_facet Galappaththige, Chamuditha Jayanga
Lai, Jason
Patten, Timothy
Dansereau, Donald
Suenderhauf, Niko
Miller, Dimity
contents Scene change detection methods built on Gaussian splatting universally follow a render-then-compare paradigm: the pre-change scene is rendered into 2D and compared against post-change images via pixel or feature residuals. This change detection problem with Gaussian Splatting has been treated as a question about pixels; we treat it as a question about primitives. We provide direct evidence that native primitive attributes alone -- position, anisotropic covariance, and color -- carry sufficient signal for scene change detection. What makes primitive-space comparison hard is the under-constrained nature of Gaussian splatting representation: independent optimizations yield primitive solutions whose count, positions, shapes, and colors differ even where nothing has changed. We address this challenge with anisotropic models of geometric and photometric drift, complemented by a per-primitive observability term that reflects the extent to which each Gaussian is constrained by the camera geometry. Operating directly on primitives gives our method, GD-DIFF, two properties that distinguish it from render-then-compare methods. First, change maps are multi-view consistent by construction, where prior work had to learn this through an additional optimization objective. Second, geometric and appearance changes are scored separately, identifying not just where but what kind of change occurred, distinguishing structural changes (e.g., an added object) from surface-level ones (e.g., a color change) without supervision or external model dependencies. On real-world benchmarks, GS-DIFF surpasses the prior state-of-the-art approach by $\sim$17% in mean Intersection over Union.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_07203
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle From Pixels to Primitives: Scene Change Detection in 3D Gaussian Splatting
Galappaththige, Chamuditha Jayanga
Lai, Jason
Patten, Timothy
Dansereau, Donald
Suenderhauf, Niko
Miller, Dimity
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Scene change detection methods built on Gaussian splatting universally follow a render-then-compare paradigm: the pre-change scene is rendered into 2D and compared against post-change images via pixel or feature residuals. This change detection problem with Gaussian Splatting has been treated as a question about pixels; we treat it as a question about primitives. We provide direct evidence that native primitive attributes alone -- position, anisotropic covariance, and color -- carry sufficient signal for scene change detection. What makes primitive-space comparison hard is the under-constrained nature of Gaussian splatting representation: independent optimizations yield primitive solutions whose count, positions, shapes, and colors differ even where nothing has changed. We address this challenge with anisotropic models of geometric and photometric drift, complemented by a per-primitive observability term that reflects the extent to which each Gaussian is constrained by the camera geometry. Operating directly on primitives gives our method, GD-DIFF, two properties that distinguish it from render-then-compare methods. First, change maps are multi-view consistent by construction, where prior work had to learn this through an additional optimization objective. Second, geometric and appearance changes are scored separately, identifying not just where but what kind of change occurred, distinguishing structural changes (e.g., an added object) from surface-level ones (e.g., a color change) without supervision or external model dependencies. On real-world benchmarks, GS-DIFF surpasses the prior state-of-the-art approach by $\sim$17% in mean Intersection over Union.
title From Pixels to Primitives: Scene Change Detection in 3D Gaussian Splatting
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07203