Exploitation of SAS interferometric phase statistics for coherent change detection

Abstract

AbstractCoherent change detection (CCD) takes advantage of the interferometric processing of synthetic aperture sonar (SAS) images and enables the detection of small scale changes to the scene between image pairs. This paper builds upon interferometric phase statistics developed for synthetic aperture radar and presents a method to differentiate between possible sources of decorrelation. A single‐pass pair of SAS images is categorized into four zones based on acoustic amplitude and coherence properties. Results suggest that regions of low coherence caused by a scene change can be differentiated from regions of low coherence due to other sources of decorrelation. Phase statistics could provide a technique to reduce the false alarm rate in CCD. Further studies are required to validate the approach for repeat‐pass SAS imagery and consider the effects of temporal decorrelation and misregistration errors on the phase distributions.