Change Detection Between SAR Images Using a Pointwise Approach and Graph Theory

Abstract

This paper investigates the problem of change detection in multitemporal synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. Our motivation is to avoid using a large-size dense neighborhood around each pixel to measure its change level, which is usually considered by classical methods in order to perform their accurate detectors. Therefore, we propose to develop a pointwise approach to detect land-cover changes between two SAR images employing the principle of signal processing on graphs. First, a set of characteristic points is extracted from one of the two images to capture the image's significant contextual information. A weighted graph is then constructed to encode the interaction among these keypoints and hence capture the local geometric structure of this first image. With regard to this graph, the coherence of the information carried by the two images is considered for measuring changes between them. In other words, the change level will depend on how much the second image still conforms to the graph structure constructed from the first image. Additionally, due to the presence of speckle noise in SAR imaging, the log-ratio operator will be exploited to perform the image comparison measure. Experimental results performed on real SAR images show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, in terms of detection performance and computational complexity, compared to classical methods.