Detection-by-Localization: Maintenance-Free Change Object Detector

Recent researches demonstrate that selflocalization performance is a very useful measure of likelihood-of-change (LoC) for change detection. In this paper, this “detection-by-localization” scheme is studied in a novel generalized task of object-level change detection. In our framework, a given query image is segmented into object-level subimages (termed “scene parts”), which are then converted to subimagelevel pixel-wise LoC maps via the detection-by-localization scheme. Our approach models a self-localization system as a ranking function, outputting a ranked list of reference images, without requiring relevance score. Thanks to this new setting, we can generalize our approach to a broad class of selflocalization systems. We further propose an aggregation of different self-localization results from different queries so as to achieve higher precision. Our ranking based self-localization model allows to fuse self-localization results from different modalities via an unsupervised rank fusion derived from a field of multi-modal information retrieval (MMR). Our framework does not rely on the raw-score-merging hypothesis. Challenging experiments of cross-season change detection using the publicly available North Campus Long-Term (NCLT) dataset validates the efficacy of our proposed method.