Delineation of built-up land change from SAR stack by analysing the coefficient of variation

Abstract

One main challenge in detecting built-up land cover changes using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) instruments is that complicated backscattering behaviours and the superimposition of speckles on rich textures cause a large number of false alarms. Using trajectory-based analyses from time-series SAR imagery can mitigate false alarms since the temporal variability in backscattering during construction improves discrimination capability. This paper presents an approach towards the detection of built-up land change based on a single-channel SAR stack. The proposed methodology includes the generation of a change indicator, the Markov modelling procedure and the delineation of changes over built-up areas. The generation of the change indicator aims to provide a feature with abundant contrast between changed and stable areas, a high signal-to-noise ratio and detail preservation. To this end, all temporal information is converted into a map of the coefficient of variation. After error removal, this change detector is combined with a Markov random field (MRF) criterion function. Rather than MRF modelling by iteration with very complex stochastic models, we propose using SAR temporal trajectory under a hypothesis test framework and interferometric coherence series to establish conditional density for each class. Then, the Graph-cuts theory is applied to delineate the boundary between changed and stable areas, followed by a binary classification procedure based on speckle divergence to exclude natural areas. The technique is tested on both synthetic data and two TerraSAR-X datasets covering representative areas with rich texture. We found that in a complex built environment that is challenging for classical change indicators and state-of-the-art techniques, the presented method can provide smaller overall error with better detail preservation.