# EMPLACE: Self-Supervised Urban Scene Change Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.17716 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17716/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Using Deep Learning and Google Street View to Estimate the Demographic Makeup of the US](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.06683/) (2017)
- [Deep Learning the City : Quantifying Urban Perception At A Global Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.01769/) (2016)
- [DR-TANet: Dynamic Receptive Temporal Attention Network for Street Scene Change Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00879/) (2021)
- [Hierarchical Paired Channel Fusion Network for Street Scene Change Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.09925/) (2020)
- [Inside Out Visual Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13546/) (2021)
- [CityPulse: Fine-Grained Assessment of Urban Change with Street View Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01107/) (2024)
- [FaceLift: A transparent deep learning framework to beautify urban scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.05961/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [UrbanFeel: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Temporal and Perceptual Understanding of City Scenes through Human Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22228/) (2025)
- [Predictive Photometric Uncertainty in Gaussian Splatting for Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.22786/) (2026)
- [Changes in Real Time: Online Scene Change Detection with Multi-View Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.12370/) (2025)
- [From Pixels to Primitives: Scene Change Detection in 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07203/) (2026)
- [Environmental Change Detection for Real-World Change Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.11481/) (2025)
- [PlenoCI: Plenoptic CharacterIstics for View Dependence Aware Change Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.28930/) (2026)
- [SCD4VPR: Multi-modal Scene Change Detection for Long-term Visual Place Recognition Database Update](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11402/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Urban change is a constant process that influences the perception of neighbourhoods and the lives of the people within them. The field of Urban Scene Change Detection (USCD) aims to capture changes in street scenes using computer vision and can help raise awareness of changes that make it possible to better understand the city and its residents. Traditionally, the field of USCD has used supervised methods with small scale datasets. This constrains methods when applied to new cities, as it requires labour-intensive labeling processes and forces a priori definitions of relevant change. In this paper we introduce AC-1M the largest USCD dataset by far of over 1.1M images, together with EMPLACE, a self-supervising method to train a Vision Transformer using our adaptive triplet loss. We show EMPLACE outperforms SOTA methods both as a pre-training method for linear fine-tuning as well as a zero-shot setting. Lastly, in a case study of Amsterdam, we show that we are able to detect both small and large changes throughout the city and that changes uncovered by EMPLACE, depending on size, correlate with housing prices - which in turn is indicative of inequity.