# TERDNet: Transformer Encoder-Recurrent Decoder Network for Scene Change Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.20822 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.20822/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [RAFT: Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12039/) (2020)
- [Visual Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12119/) (2022)
- [Convolutional LSTM Network: A Machine Learning Approach for Precipitation Nowcasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.04214/) (2015)
- [FlowNet: Learning Optical Flow with Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.06852/) (2015)
- [Fully Convolutional Siamese Networks for Change Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.08462/) (2018)
- [Delving Deeper into Convolutional Networks for Learning Video Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06432/) (2015)
- [PredRNN++: Towards A Resolution of the Deep-in-Time Dilemma in Spatiotemporal Predictive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06300/) (2018)
- [Urban Change Detection for Multispectral Earth Observation Using Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.08468/) (2018)
- [Weakly Supervised Silhouette-based Semantic Scene Change Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11985/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Lightweight Event-based Optical Flow Estimation via Iterative Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13726/) (2022)
- [ChangeSim: Towards End-to-End Online Scene Change Detection in Industrial Indoor Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05368/) (2021)
- [How to Reduce Change Detection to Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07557/) (2022)
- [3D VSG: Long-term Semantic Scene Change Prediction through 3D Variable Scene Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07896/) (2022)
- [Towards Generalizable Scene Change Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.06214/) (2024)
- [Zero-Shot Scene Change Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11210/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this work, we address the challenge of Scene Change Detection (SCD), where the goal is to identify variations between two images of the same location captured at different times. Existing SCD models often overlook the varying importance of features across layers, employ single-step decoders that confine refinement, and provide limited insight into encoder pretraining strategies. We propose TERDNet, a Transformer Encoder-Recurrent Decoder Network designed to overcome these limitations. TERDNet consists of a transformer-based encoder that extracts multi-level representations, a feature fusion module that integrates correlation volumes with these features, a recurrent 3-gate-GRU decoder that performs iterative refinement, and a combined convolution-interpolation upsampler that restores fine-grained resolution. Extensive experiments on four public benchmarks show that TERDNet consistently outperforms prior approaches and produces more accurate and detailed change masks. Ablation studies confirm the benefit of segmentation-based pretraining and the effectiveness of our fusion design. In addition, robustness tests under viewpoint misalignment confirm TERDNet's potential for deployment in real-world robotic systems, where reliable perception is critical. Our code is available at https://github.com/AutoCompSysLab/TERDNet.