City-Scale Change Detection in Cadastral 3D Models Using Images

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a method to detect changes in the geometry of a city using panoramic images captured by a car driving around the city. We designed our approach to account for all the challenges involved in a large scale application of change detection, such as, inaccuracies in the input geometry, errors in the geo-location data of the images, as well as, the limited amount of information due to sparse imagery. We evaluated our approach on an area of 6 square kilometers inside a city, using 3420 images downloaded from Google StreetView. These images besides being publicly available, are also a good example of panoramic images captured with a driving vehicle, and hence demonstrating all the possible challenges resulting from such an acquisition. We also quantitatively compared the performance of our approach with respect to a ground truth, as well as to prior work. This evaluation shows that our approach outperforms the current state of the art.