Coherent change detection of fine traces based on multi-angle SAR observations

Abstract

Coherent change detection (CCD) is an effective method to detect subtle scene changes that occur between temporal synthetic aperture radar (SAR) observations. Most coherence estimators are obtained from a Hermitian product based on local statistics. Increasing the number of samples in the local window can improve the estimation bias, but cause the loss of the estimated images spatial resolution. The limitations of these estimators lead to unclear contour of the disturbed region, and even the omission of fine change targets. In this paper, a CCD approach is proposed to detect fine scene changes from multi-temporal and multi-angle SAR image pairs. Multi-angle CCD estimator can improve the contrast between the change target and the background clutter by jointly accumulating singleangle alternative estimator results without further loss of image resolution. The sensitivity of detection performance to image quantity and angle interval is analyzed. Theoretical analysis and experimental results verify the performance of the proposed algorithm.