FOCUS: Fine-Grained Open-Vocabulary Change Detection for Uncertainty-Aware Semi-Static Scenes

Abstract:Autonomous robots operating over long periods must keep their environmental memory up to date as the world changes between visits. In semi-static environments, an object may be replaced in place by a different but geometrically and semantically similar instance, making the identity change difficult to detect from geometry or coarse semantics alone. We present FOCUS, an uncertainty-aware framework for object-level change detection and map maintenance. We formulate semi-static memory maintenance as probabilistic inference that fuses geometric likelihood with appearance likelihood rendered from a 3D Gaussian map. A recursive three-state estimator maintains whether each mapped object is PERSISTED, REPLACED, or REMOVED. To account for imperfect 3DGS rendering, we model the rendered appearance evidence probabilistically rather than using it as a direct change score, with the model parameters automatically calibrated from a change-free replay of the initial mapping session. We evaluate our method on a new Isaac Sim warehouse benchmark with ambiguous in-place replacements and on the real-world TorWIC dataset. It improves object-level replacement F1 from 0.20 to 0.84 over a probabilistic baseline and transfers to real-world data without manual parameter retuning.

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2610.05639 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2610.05639v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.05639 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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