GeoCDX: An Automated Change Detection & Exploitation System for High Resolution Satelite Imagery

Abstract

The demand for high-resolution commercial satellite imagery (HR-CSI) has increased significantly over the last 5 years for a wide variety of applications. This demand has driven an increase in volume, frequency of acquisition, and spatial resolution of HR-CSI. In turn, this has spurred the need for more accurate and time-efficient processing tools for analyzing geospatial information to support user-specific applications. One such application is change detection between multi-temporal HR-CSI data. The significant increase in quantity and quality of multi-temporal HR-CSI data makes traditional manual analysis impractical. Thus, there is a need for a fully automated change detection system that not only identifies areas of change, but also allows users to filter, sort through, and analyze areas of change quickly and efficiently. Here we describe a tool - GeoCDX (Geospatial Change Detection and Exploitation) - to meet this need. GeoCDX is an integrated system that performs image ingestion and registration, feature extraction, and change analysis. The change detection results from GeoCDX are web accessible with additional interfaces to Google Earth™ (GE) and Google Maps™ (GM). In the near future GeoCDX will be integrated with its sister system GeoIRIS (Geospatial Information Retrieval and Indexing System). This integration will produce a very powerful HR-CSI analysis package with the change detection capabilities of GeoCDX and the content-based image retrieval system of GeoIRIS.