Detection and Description of Change in Visual Streams

Abstract

This paper presents a framework for the analysis of changes in visual streams: ordered sequences of images, possibly separated by significant time gaps. We propose a new approach to incorporating unlabeled data into training to generate natural language descriptions of change. We also develop a framework for estimating the time of change in visual stream. We use learned representations for change evidence and consistency of perceived change, and combine these in a regularized graph cut based change detector. Experimental evaluation on visual stream datasets, which we release as part of our contribution, shows that representation learning driven by natural language descriptions significantly improves change detection accuracy, compared to methods that do not rely on language.