Information theoretical similarity measure for change detection

Abstract

In this paper, mixed information similarity measure and a multidimensional density estimation method based on multivariate Edgeworth series expansion are proposed and assessed for the task of multi-temporal change detection. To unify mutual information and variational information, mixed information is proposed to quantify the degree of dependence between two random variables, which are intuitively appropriate for multi-temporal change detection. In the literature, Edgeworth series expansion is widely used in statistics and various engineering fields for one-dimensional density estimation. To compute the mixed information measure, multidimensional density estimation based on multivariate Edgeworth series expansion is proposed and evaluated. Two experiments on real SAR images and optical images are carried out to evaluate the performance of change detection. Experimental results confirm the promising capability of mixed information and the multivariate density estimation based on Edgeworth series expansion.