A hierarchical spatial-temporal graph-kernel for high-resolution SAR image change detection

Abstract

ABSTRACTEffective utilization of structural information is important for high-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image change detection. For comprehensively utilizing the local and global structures in SAR images, a hierarchical spatial-temporal graph kernel (STGK) method is proposed in this paper for high-resolution SAR image change detection. First, the bi-temporal hierarchical graph models are constructed for extracting the local-global structures in the bi-temporal SAR images. Then, a STGK function, which measures the spatial and temporal similarities between the local-global structures, is constructed for indicating the change levels between the bi-temporal images. Finally, a support vector machine (SVM) is implemented with the STGK function for producing the final change detection results. Experimental results on real GaoFen-3 SAR data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, and prove that the STGK method is capable of detecting changed areas with relatively complex structures.