# Diff-Net: Image Feature Difference based High-Definition Map Change Detection for Autonomous Driving

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.07030 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07030/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in End-to-end system architecture, one of 9 directions in End-to-end autonomous driving.
- Builds on 21 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Jul 2021.

## Placed in

- End-to-end autonomous driving / [End-to-end system architecture](https://mlsanity.com/driving/end-to-end-system-architecture/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [Convolutional LSTM Network: A Machine Learning Approach for Precipitation Nowcasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.04214/) (2015)
- [Generalized Intersection over Union: A Metric and A Loss for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09630/) (2019)
- [Fast and Accurate Deep Network Learning by Exponential Linear Units (ELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07289/) (2015)
- [CornerNet: Detecting Objects as Paired Keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.01244/) (2018)
- [MultiPath: Multiple Probabilistic Anchor Trajectory Hypotheses for Behavior Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.05449/) (2019)
- [ChauffeurNet: Learning to Drive by Imitating the Best and Synthesizing the Worst](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03079/) (2018)
- [Soft-NMS -- Improving Object Detection With One Line of Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04503/) (2017)
- [IntentNet: Learning to Predict Intention from Raw Sensor Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.07907/) (2021)
- [Uncertainty-aware Short-term Motion Prediction of Traffic Actors for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.05819/) (2018)
- [DeepVideoMVS: Multi-View Stereo on Video with Recurrent Spatio-Temporal Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02177/) (2020)
- [Weakly Supervised Silhouette-based Semantic Scene Change Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11985/) (2018)
- [Hierarchical Paired Channel Fusion Network for Street Scene Change Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.09925/) (2020)
- [Learning to Measure Change: Fully Convolutional Siamese Metric Networks for Scene Change Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.09111/) (2018)
- [Learning Accurate and Human-Like Driving using Semantic Maps and Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07218/) (2020)
- [Driving Through Ghosts: Behavioral Cloning with False Positives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.12969/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Robust Scene Change Detection Using Visual Foundation Models and Cross-Attention Mechanisms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16850/) (2024)
- [OE-BevSeg: An Object Informed and Environment Aware Multimodal Framework for Bird's-eye-view Vehicle Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13137/) (2024)
- [Automatic Map Update Using Dashcam Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.12131/) (2021)
- [Information-Bottleneck Driven Binary Neural Network for Change Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.03504/) (2025)
- [SceneEdited: A City-Scale Benchmark for 3D HD Map Updating via Image-Guided Change Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.15153/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Up-to-date High-Definition (HD) maps are essential for self-driving cars. To achieve constantly updated HD maps, we present a deep neural network (DNN), Diff-Net, to detect changes in them. Compared to traditional methods based on object detectors, the essential design in our work is a parallel feature difference calculation structure that infers map changes by comparing features extracted from the camera and rasterized images. To generate these rasterized images, we project map elements onto images in the camera view, yielding meaningful map representations that can be consumed by a DNN accordingly. As we formulate the change detection task as an object detection problem, we leverage the anchor-based structure that predicts bounding boxes with different change status categories. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed method is the first end-to-end network that tackles the high-definition map change detection task, yielding a single stage solution. Furthermore, rather than relying on single frame input, we introduce a spatio-temporal fusion module that fuses features from history frames into the current, thus improving the overall performance. Finally, we comprehensively validate our method's effectiveness using freshly collected datasets. Results demonstrate that our Diff-Net achieves better performance than the baseline methods and is ready to be integrated into a map production pipeline maintaining an up-to-date HD map.