Local Histogram-Based Analysis for Detecting Land Cover Change Using VHR Remote Sensing Images

Abstract

The majority of the change detection (CD) methods consider spatial information by using a regular window or strict mathematical model. Moreover, these methods use the spectra directly to measure the change magnitude between bitemporal images. To solve this problem, local histogram-based analysis (LHBA) is proposed for detecting a land cover change in this letter. This new approach aims to inhibit the pseudo change by defining the local histogram trend (LHT) in an adaptive manner instead of using spectral values to measure change magnitude directly. In the proposed approach, the spatial information around each pixel is first exploited by defining an adaptive local histogram. The LHT distance between the pairwise local histograms is then developed to measure the change magnitude between the pairwise pixels of bitemporal images. Finally, the change magnitude image is generated, and a binary CD is achieved by a threshold method. Experiments based on two pairs of very high-resolution remote sensing images, which refer to land use change and landslides events, demonstrate the advantages and performance of the proposed approach.