SAR Image Change Detection Method Based on Target Detection

Abstract

Change detection with Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image has wide application prospect, but an accurate registration is a very important precondition for most of the present change detection methods. However, the technology of image registration is still a hard work in the area of image processing especially for SAR image, so it is rather difficult to find a good SAR image registration method which should have both strong adaptability and high accuracy. This will restrict the application of change detection for SAR image to some extent. Thinking of the problem of registration accuracy for the present change detection methods, and according to the characteristics of man-made target in SAR image, a new change detection method with SAR image is presented in this paper, which is based on target detection. In this method, the change detection process is divided into two steps. First, the man-made targets in the images will be detected; second, we will compare the similarity between the relative position relationships of the man-made targets which have been detected from the two images, then the change of images will be decided from this result. As the change detection process is mainly dependent on the relative position relationships of the detected targets, the requirement to the accurate registration can be greatly reduced. The experimental result shows that this method is capable of detecting image changes with rough registration accuracy.