O-SCD++: Replay-Free Online Scene Change Detection via Recursive Evidence Fusion

Chamuditha Jayanga Galappaththige, Jason Lai, Lloyd Windrim, Timothy Patten, Donald G. Dansereau +2

Online scene change detection requires an agent to detect what has changed in a previously mapped environment while it is still on site, observing from unconstrained viewpoints and without access to future observations. This causal setting is strictly harder than its offline counterpart, and online methods have consistently trailed offline accuracy. O-SCD closed that gap by treating change as a persistent property of a 3D Gaussian splatting map of the reference scene, surpassing the strongest offline methods in change detection accuracy while operating at over 10 frames per second. O-SCD optimizes a change field over the Gaussians of the reference map, refitting it to all past cue maps at every frame, a step that consumes more than half of the per-frame budget and forces accuracy to be traded against speed. We present a replay-free formulation that eliminates this trade-off. Because the reference map stays fixed, rendering the change field is a linear operation. Each new observation can therefore be carried onto the map's Gaussians directly, by a single backward pass of the renderer, which reduces multi-view fusion to an exact two-scalar recursion per Gaussian. Past observations…