Man-Made Change Detection Using High-Resolution Cosmo-SkyMed SAR Interferometry

Abstract

The technique of coherent change detection (CCD) in repeat-pass synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery has the potential to detect very subtle scene changes. With the advent of high-resolution space-borne SAR images, CCD has received a lot of interest. In CCD, the interferometric coherence is evaluated and analyzed to detect changes. The sample coherence estimator is biased, especially for low-coherence values, which complicates CCD map analysis and interpretation. The bias decreases when the number of samples used to evaluate the coherence increases. However, a large number of samples causes the loss of the small size changes. In this work, an adaptive method for coherence estimation is described and evaluated. The local fringe frequency is used as an additional change indicator to adapt the number of samples used to estimate the coherence. The results obtained using Cosmo-SkyMed (CSK) SAR images indicate that the proposed adaptive method improves detection performance while preserving the small size changes.