Leveraging Geometric Priors for Unaligned Scene Change Detection

Abstract: Unaligned Scene Change Detection aims to detect scene changes between image pairs captured at different times without assuming viewpoint alignment. To handle viewpoint variations, current methods rely solely on 2D visual cues to establish cross-image correspondence to assist change detection. However, large viewpoint changes can alter visual observations, causing appearance-based matching to drift or fail. Additionally, supervision limited to 2D change masks from small-scale SCD datasets restricts the learning of generalizable multi-view knowledge, making it difficult to reliably identify visual overlaps and handle occlusions. This lack of explicit geometric reasoning represents a critical yet overlooked limitation. In this work, we introduce geometric priors for the first time to address the core challenges of unaligned SCD, for reliable identification of visual overlaps, robust correspondence establishment, and explicit occlusion detection. Building on these priors, we propose a training-free framework that integrates them with the powerful representations of a visual foundation model to enable reliable change detection under viewpoint misalignment. Through extensive evaluation on the PSCD, ChangeSim, and PASLCD datasets, we demonstrate that our approach achieves superior and robust performance. Our code will be released at https://github.com/ZilingLiu/GeoSCD.