Novel Automatic Approach for Land Cover Change Detection by Using VHR Remote Sensing Images

Abstract

Many land cover change detection (LCCD) approaches applied on very high resolution (VHR) remote sensing images utilize spatial information by using a regular window or strict mathematical model. However, regular shape or strict models cannot fit the various shapes and sizes of the ground targets. In this article, a novel LCCD approach without the parameter is proposed to detect land cover change with VHR remote sensing images. First, an adaptive spatial-context extraction algorithm is applied to explore contextual information around a pixel. Second, the change magnitude between pairwise pixels is quantitatively measured by computing the band-to-band distance which is defined by the pairwise adaptive regions around the corresponding pixels. Finally, after the generation of a change magnitude image (CMI), a binary threshold method called double-window flexible pace search (DFPS) is adopted to divide CMI into a binary change detection map. The performance of the proposed approach is verified by comparing it with five state-of-the-art methods with three pairs of VHR images. The comparisons demonstrated that the proposed approach achieved the improved detected results comparing with state-of-the-art LCCD methods. The code of the proposed approach is available at <uri xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://github.com/TongfeiLiu/ASEA-CD</uri> .