From Image Hashing to Scene Change Detection

Image hashing provides compact representations for efficient storage and retrieval but is inherently limited to global comparison and cannot reason about where changes occur. This limitation prevents hashing from being directly applicable to scene change detection, where spatial localization is essential. In this work, we revisit hashing from a scene change detection perspective and propose HashSCD, a patch-wise hashing framework that enables both efficient global change detection and localized change identification. HashSCD encodes spatially aligned patches into compact hash codes and aggregates them through an XOR-like operation, allowing change detection and localization to be performed directly in the Hamming space without repeated inference on previous images. The model is trained in an unsupervised manner using contrastive learning at both patch and global levels. Experiments demonstrate that HashSCD achieves competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art unsupervised hashing and scene change detection methods, while significantly reducing computational cost and storage requirements.

NTIRE 2026 The Second Challenge on Day and Night Raindrop Removal for Dual-Focused Images: Methods and Results

This paper presents an overview of the NTIRE 2026 Second Challenge on Day and Night Raindrop Removal for Dual-Focused Images. Building upon the success of the first edition, this challenge attracted a wide range of impressive solutions, all developed and evaluated on our real-world Raindrop Clarity dataset~\cite{jin2024raindrop}. For this edition, we adjust the dataset with 14,139 images for training, 407 images for validation, and 593 images for testing. The primary goal of this challenge is to establish a strong and practical benchmark for the removal of raindrops under various illumination and focus conditions. In total, 168 teams have registered for the competition, and 17 teams submitted valid final solutions and fact sheets for the testing phase. The submitted methods achieved strong performance on the Raindrop Clarity dataset, demonstrating the growing progress in this challenging task.