Novel Multiscale Decision Fusion Approach to Unsupervised Change Detection for High-Resolution Images

Abstract

High-resolution remote sensing images usually contain multiscale information, which can be used to enhance the change detection (CD) performance. How to make effective use of multiscale information needs intensive study. This letter presents a novel multiscale decision fusion (MDF) method for unsupervised CD based on Dempster–Shafer (DS) theory and modified conditional random field (CRF). The method consists of three main steps: 1) images of three different scales are created automatically by image segmentation, and then three-scale difference images (DIs) are produced by applying change vector analysis to the three-scale images; 2) the membership function of each scale DI is estimated by fuzzy clustering, and the fusion membership, as well as an initial CD map, is obtained by combining the estimated membership using DS theory; and 3) the initial CD map is refined with an improved CRF that incorporates a spatial attraction model. The proposed method can combine the multiscale information in images and the spatial contextual information. The effectiveness of the proposed method was validated by two experiments with high-resolution remote sensing images.