Automatic Change Detection in Visual Scenes

Abstract: This thesis proposes a Visual Scene Change Detector(VSCD) system which is a system which involves four parts, image retrieval, image registration, image change detection and panorama creation. Two prestudies are conducted in order to find a proposed image registration method and a image retrieval method. The two found methods are then combined with a proposed image registration method and a proposed panorama creation method to form the proposed VSCD. The image retrieval prestudy evaluates a SIFT related method with a bag of words related method and finds the SIFT related method to be the superior method. The image change detection prestudy evaluates 8 different image change detection methods. Result from the image change detection prestudy shows that the methods performance is dependent on the image category and an ensemble method is the least dependent on the category of images. An ensemble method is found to be the best performing method followed by a range filter method and then a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) method. Using a combination of the 2 image retrieval methods and the 8 image change detection method 16 different VSCD are formed and tested. The final result show that the VSCD comprised of the best methods from the prestudies is the best performing method.