Did It Change? Learning to Detect Point-Of-Interest Changes for Proactive Map Updates

Jerome Revaud, Minhyeok Heo, Rafael S. Rezende, Chanmi You, Seong-Gyun Jeong; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019, pp. 4086-4095

Maps are an increasingly important tool in our daily lives, yet their rich semantic content still largely depends on manual input. Motivated by the broad availability of geo-tagged street-view images, we propose a new task aiming to make the map update process more proactive. We focus on automatically detecting changes of Points of Interest (POIs), specifically stores or shops of any kind, based on visual input. Faced with the lack of an appropriate benchmark, we build and release a large dataset, captured in two large shopping centers, that comprises 33K geo-localized images and 578 POIs. We then design a generic approach that compares two image sets captured in the same venue at different times and outputs POI changes as a ranked list of map locations. In contrast to logo or franchise recognition approaches, our system does not depend on an external franchise database. It is instead inspired by recent deep metric learning approaches that learn a similarity function fit to the task at hand. We compare various loss functions to learn a metric aligned with the POI change detection goal, and report promising results.