Gabor Feature Based Unsupervised Change Detection of Multitemporal SAR Images Based on Two-Level Clustering

Abstract

In this letter, we propose a simple yet effective unsupervised change detection approach for multitemporal synthetic aperture radar images from the perspective of clustering. This approach jointly exploits the robust Gabor wavelet representation and the advanced cascade clustering. First, a log-ratio image is generated from the multitemporal images. Then, to integrate contextual information in the feature extraction process, Gabor wavelets are employed to yield the representation of the log-ratio image at multiple scales and orientations, whose maximum magnitude over all orientations in each scale is concatenated to form the Gabor feature vector. Next, a cascade clustering algorithm is designed in this discriminative feature space by successively combining the first-level fuzzy c-means clustering with the second-level nearest neighbor rule. Finally, the two-level combination of the changed and unchanged results generates the final change map. Experimental results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.