GS-Pool: Object-Level Change Detection in 3D Gaussian Splatting

Abstract

Factories, museums and surveyors photograph the same space months apart and need to know which objects changed. When each visit is reconstructed with 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), a direct comparison of the two reconstructions does not answer this. Training is stochastic, so two reconstructions of an unchanged space never coincide, and the second visit is often a quick re-scan with far fewer photographs. We propose GS-Pool, which takes two independently reconstructed Gaussian fields of the same space and returns the changed objects in each, together with their masks. SAM2 masks of each visit's photographs are lifted onto the Gaussians that render them and merged into an object pool, so every decision is taken once per object in 3D. We introduce a photographic carrier, the 3DGS training loss of each input reconstruction against the other visit's photographs, backpropagated to the Gaussians that rendered each pixel. We combine it with GS-Diff's geometry and colour terms and our distilled DINOv3 features. This evidence is compared with that of the objects present in both visits, which sets a change threshold for each scene. On PASLCD, GS-Pool reaches mIoU/F1 scores of 0.751/0.846 against 0.644/0.758 for GS-Diff, the strongest prior method, a gain of 17%/12%. Its mIoU is also 36%, 40% and 57% above that of O-SCD, PlenoCI and MV-3DCD, and it reaches 0.855 mIoU on CL-Splats, 33% above MV-3DCD. Each changed object is returned as a set of Gaussians with the evidence behind its decision, which an inspector can review in 3D.