Object-based Change Detection Method Research Articles

Field maturity detection via interferometric synthetic aperture radar images time-series: a case study for maize crop

ABSTRACT Detecting the field maturity moment for maize (Zea mays L.) crop represents a relevant point to estimate its optimal harvest time. Knowing the optimal harvest time (defined by grain moisture content) at the end of the crop season is a major concern for maize farmers, as it could lead to substantial economic losses if not harvested on time. For this crop, optimal harvest time usually occurs 3–4 weeks after field maturity, depending on weather conditions. Therefore, this study focused on the interferometric coherence time-series analysis at the end of the maize crop season, to indirectly estimate the field maturity. For such purpose, a coherence object-based change detection method using Sentinel-1 SAR images was developed aiming to estimate the potential field maturity time. These estimations were assessed using an independent data set of field maturity dates obtained through field inspection and crop growth modelling. The technique was tested over 52 fields in the northwest region of Kansas, United States, with a detection rate of 80%, and a field maturity estimation error of 10 days (assessed with the root mean square error). The proposed method constitutes a promising approach to estimating the maize field maturity in near-real time, determining the field harvest readiness, and developing a decision support tool to assist farmers in prioritizing the allocation of fields at harvest time.

Uncertainty Analysis for Object-Based Change Detection in Very High-Resolution Satellite Images Using Deep Learning Network

Object-based image analysis (OBIA) is better than pixel-based image analysis for change detection (CD) in very high-resolution (VHR) remote sensing images. Although the effectiveness of deep learning approaches has recently been proved, few studies have investigated OBIA and deep learning for CD. Previously proposed methods use the object information obtained from the preprocessing and postprocessing phase of deep learning. In general, they use the dominant or most frequently used label information with respect to all the pixels inside an object without considering any quantitative criteria to integrate the deep learning network and object information. In this study, we developed an object-based CD method for VHR satellite images using a deep learning network to denote the uncertainty associated with an object and effectively detect the changes in an area without the ground truth data. The proposed method defines the uncertainty associated with an object and mainly includes two phases. Initially, CD objects were generated by unsupervised CD methods, and the objects were used to train the CD network comprising three-dimensional convolutional layers and convolutional long short-term memory layers. The CD objects were updated according to the uncertainty level after the learning process was completed. Further, the updated CD objects were considered as the training data for the CD network. This process was repeated until the entire area was classified into two classes, i.e., change and no-change, with respect to the object units or defined epoch. The experiments conducted using two different VHR satellite images confirmed that the proposed method achieved the best performance when compared with the performances obtained using the traditional CD approaches. The method was less affected by salt and pepper noise and could effectively extract the region of change in object units without ground truth data. Furthermore, the proposed method can offer advantages associated with unsupervised CD methods and a CD network subjected to postprocessing by effectively utilizing the deep learning technique and object information.

Object-Based Change Detection of Very High Resolution Images by Fusing Pixel-Based Change Detection Results Using Weighted Dempster–Shafer Theory

Change detection (CD), one of the primary applications of multi-temporal satellite images, is the process of identifying changes in the Earth’s surface occurring over a period of time using images of the same geographic area on different dates. CD is divided into pixel-based change detection (PBCD) and object-based change detection (OBCD). Although PBCD is more popular due to its simple algorithms and relatively easy quantitative analysis, applying this method in very high resolution (VHR) images often results in misdetection or noise. Because of this, researchers have focused on extending the PBCD results to the OBCD map in VHR images. In this paper, we present a proposed weighted Dempster-Shafer theory (wDST) fusion method to generate the OBCD by combining multiple PBCD results. The proposed wDST approach automatically calculates and assigns a certainty weight for each object of the PBCD result while considering the stability of the object. Moreover, the proposed wDST method can minimize the tendency of the number of changed objects to decrease or increase based on the ratio of changed pixels to the total pixels in the image when the PBCD result is extended to the OBCD result. First, we performed co-registration between the VHR multitemporal images to minimize the geometric dissimilarity. Then, we conducted the image segmentation of the co-registered pair of multitemporal VHR imagery. Three change intensity images were generated using change vector analysis (CVA), iteratively reweighted-multivariate alteration detection (IRMAD), and principal component analysis (PCA). These three intensity images were exploited to generate different binary PBCD maps, after which the maps were fused with the segmented image using the wDST to generate the OBCD map. Finally, the accuracy of the proposed CD technique was assessed by using a manually digitized map. Two VHR multitemporal datasets were used to test the proposed approach. Experimental results confirmed the superiority of the proposed method by comparing the existing PBCD methods and the OBCD method using the majority voting technique.

Change Detection of High Spatial Resolution Images Based on Region-Line Primitive Association Analysis and Evidence Fusion

Change detection (CD) remains an important issue in remote sensing applications, especially for high spatial resolution (HSR) images, but it has yet to be fully resolved. This work proposes a novel object-based change detection (OBCD) method for HSR images that is based on region–line primitive association analysis and evidence fusion. In the proposed method, bitemporal images are separately segmented, and the segmentation results are overlapped to obtain the temporal region primitives (TRPs). The temporal line primitives (TLPs) are obtained by straight line detection on bitemporal images. In the initial CD stage, Dempster–Shafer evidence theory fuses the multiple items of evidence of the TRPs’ spectrum, edge, and gradient changes, and obtains the initial changed areas. In the refining CD stage, the association between the TRPs and their contacting TLPs in the unchanged areas is established on the basis of the region–line primitive association framework, and the TRPs’ main line directions (MLDs) are calculated. Some changed TRPs omitted in the initial CD stage are recovered by their MLD changes, thereby refining the initial CD results. Different from common OBCD methods, the proposed method considers the change evidence of TRPs’ internal and boundary information simultaneously via information complementation between TRPs and TLPs. The proposed method can significantly reduce missed alarms while maintaining a low level of false alarms in OBCD, thereby improving total accuracy. In our experiments, our method is superior to common CD methods, including change vector analysis (CVA), PCA-k-means, and iterative reweighted multivariate alteration detection (IRMAD), in terms of overall accuracy, missed alarms, and Kappa coefficient.

EARTHQUAKE-INDUCED BUILDING DETECTION BASED ON OBJECT-LEVEL TEXTURE FEATURE CHANGE DETECTION OF MULTI-TEMPORAL SAR IMAGES

Abstract The damage of buildings is the major cause of casualties of from earthquakes. The traditional pixel-based earthquake damaged building detection method is prone to be affected by speckle noise. In this paper, an object-based change detection method is presented for the detection of earthquake damage using the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data. The method is based on object-level texture features of SAR data. Firstly, the principal component analysis is used to transform the optimal texture features into a suitable feature space for extracting the key change. And then, the feature space is clustered by the watershed segmentation algorithm, which introduces the concept of object orientation and carries out the calculation of the difference map at the object level. Having training samples, the classification threshold values for different grade of earthquake damage can be trained, and the detection of damaged building is achieved. The proposed method could visualize the earthquake damage efficiently using the Advanced Land Observing Satellite-1 (ALOS-1) images. Its performance is evaluated in the town of jiegu, which was hit severely by the Yushu Earthquake. The cross-validation results shows that the overall accuracy is significantly higher than TDCD and IDCD.

Reducing the effects of vegetation phenology on change detection in tropical seasonal biomes

Tropical seasonal biomes (TSBs), such as the savannas (Cerrado) and semi-arid woodlands (Caatinga) of Brazil, are vulnerable ecosystems to human-induced disturbances. Remote sensing can detect disturbances such as deforestation and fires, but the analysis of change detection in TSBs is affected by seasonal modifications in vegetation indices due to phenology. To reduce the effects of vegetation phenology on changes caused by deforestation and fires, we developed a novel object-based change detection method. The approach combines both the spatial and spectral domains of the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), using a pair of Operational Land Imager (OLI)/Landsat-8 images acquired in 2015 and 2016. We used semivariogram indices (SIs) as spatial features and descriptive statistics as spectral features (SFs). We tested the performance of the method using three machine-learning algorithms: support vector machine (SVM), artificial neural network (ANN) and random forest (RF). The results showed that the combination of spatial and spectral information improved change detection by correctly classifying areas with seasonal changes in NDVI caused by vegetation phenology and areas with NDVI changes caused by human-induced disturbances. The use of semivariogram indices reduced the effects of vegetation phenology on change detection. The performance of the classifiers was generally comparable, but the SVM presented the highest overall classification accuracy (92.27%) when using the hybrid set of NDVI-derived spectral-spatial features. From the vegetated areas, 18.71% of changes were caused by human-induced disturbances between 2015 and 2016. The method is particularly useful for TSBs where vegetation exhibits strong seasonality and regularly spaced time series of satellite images are difficult to obtain due to persistent cloud cover.

Change Detection in Coral Reef Environment Using High-Resolution Images: Comparison of Object-Based and Pixel-Based Paradigms

Despite increases in the spatial resolution of satellite imagery prompting interest in object-based image analysis, few studies have used object-based methods for monitoring changes in coral reefs. This study proposes a high accuracy object-based change detection (OBCD) method intended for coral reef environment, which uses QuickBird and WorldView-2 images. The proposed methodological framework includes image fusion, multi-temporal image segmentation, image differencing, random forests models, and object-area-based accuracy assessment. For validation, we applied the method to images of four coral reef study sites in the South China Sea. We compared the proposed OBCD method with a conventional pixel-based change detection (PBCD) method by implementing both methods under the same conditions. The average overall accuracy of OBCD exceeded 90%, which was approximately 20% higher than PBCD. The OBCD method was free from salt-and-pepper effects and was less prone to images misregistration in terms of change detection accuracy and mapping results. The object-area-based accuracy assessment reached a higher overall accuracy and per-class accuracy than the object-number-based and pixel-number-based accuracy assessment.

A scale self-adapting segmentation approach and knowledge transfer for automatically updating land use/cover change databases using high spatial resolution images

Automatic updating of land use/cover change (LUCC) databases using high spatial resolution images (HSRI) is important for environmental monitoring and policy making, especially for coastal areas that connect the land and coast and that tend to change frequently. Many object-based change detection methods are proposed, especially those combining historical LUCC with HSRI. However, the scale parameter(s) segmenting the serial temporal images, which directly determines the average object size, is hard to choose without experts’ intervention. And the samples transferred from historical LUCC also need experts’ intervention to avoid insufficient or wrong samples. With respect to the scale parameter(s) choosing, a Scale Self-Adapting Segmentation (SSAS) approach based on the exponential sampling of a scale parameter and location of the local maximum of a weighted local variance was proposed to determine the scale selection problem when segmenting images constrained by LUCC for detecting changes. With respect to the samples transferring, Knowledge Transfer (KT), a classifier trained on historical images with LUCC and applied in the classification of updated images, was also proposed. Comparison experiments were conducted in a coastal area of Zhujiang, China, using SPOT 5 images acquired in 2005 and 2010. The results reveal that (1) SSAS can segment images more effectively without intervention of experts. (2) KT can also reach the maximum accuracy of samples transfer without experts’ intervention. Strategy SSAS + KT would be a good choice if the temporal historical image and LUCC match, and the historical image and updated image are obtained from the same resource.

Cosegmentation for Object-Based Building Change Detection From High-Resolution Remotely Sensed Images

This paper presents a cosegmentation-based method for building change detection from multitemporal high-resolution (HR) remotely sensed images, providing a new solution to object-based change detection (OBCD). First, the magnitude of a difference image is calculated to represent the change feature. Next, cosegmentation is performed via graph-based energy minimization by combining the change feature with image features at each phase, directly resulting in foreground as multitemporal changed objects and background as unchanged area. Finally, the spatial correspondence between changed objects is established through overlay analysis. Cosegmentation provides a separate and associated, rather than a separate and independent, multitemporal image segmentation method for OBCD, which has two advantages: 1) both the image and change features are used to produce foreground segments as changed objects, which can take full advantage of multitemporal information and produce two spatially corresponded change detection maps by the association of the change feature, having the ability to reveal the thematic, geometric, and numeric changes of objects and 2) the background in the cosegmentation result represents the unchanged area, which naturally avoids the problem of matching inconsistent unchanged objects caused by the separate and independent multitemporal segmentation strategy. Experimental results on five HR datasets verify the effectiveness of the proposed method and the comparisons with the state-of-the-art OBCD methods further show its superiority.

Object-based change detection method using refined Markov random field

In order to fully consider the local spatial constraints between neighboring objects in object-based change detection (OBCD), an OBCD approach is presented by introducing a refined Markov random field (MRF). First, two periods of images are stacked and segmented to produce image objects. Second, object spectral and textual histogram features are extracted and G-statistic is implemented to measure the distance among different histogram distributions. Meanwhile, object heterogeneity is calculated by combining spectral and textual histogram distance using adaptive weight. Third, an expectation-maximization algorithm is applied for determining the change category of each object and the initial change map is then generated. Finally, a refined change map is produced by employing the proposed refined object-based MRF method. Three experiments were conducted and compared with some state-of-the-art unsupervised OBCD methods to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method obtains the highest accuracy among the methods used in this paper, which confirms its validness and effectiveness in OBCD.

Change detection of built-up land: A framework of combining pixel-based detection and object-based recognition

This study proposed a new framework that combines pixel-level change detection and object-level recognition to detect changes of built-up land from high-spatial resolution remote sensing images. First, an adaptive differencing method was designed to detect changes at the pixel level based on both spectral and textural features. Next, the changed pixels were subjected to a set of morphological operations to improve the completeness and to generate changed objects, achieving the transition of change detection from the pixel level to the object level. The changed objects were further recognised through the difference of morphological building index in two phases to indicate changed objects on built-up land. The transformation from changed pixels to changed objects makes the proposed framework distinct with both the pixel-based and the object-based change detection methods. Compared with the pixel-based methods, the proposed framework can improve the change detection capability through the transformation and successive recognition of objects. Compared with the object-based method, the proposed framework avoids the issue of multitemporal segmentation and can generate changed objects directly from changed pixels. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the transformation from changed pixels to changed objects and the successive object-based recognition on improving the detection accuracy, which justify the application potential of the proposed change detection framework.

Identification of new Landslides from High Resolution Satellite Data Covering a Large Area Using Object-Based Change Detection Methods

Change detection using time series satellite images is one of the most widely used techniques to identify new landslides. Object-based change detection (OBCD) allows incorporation of expert knowledge in the form of spectral, morphometric and contextual criteria leading to a higher classification accuracy in comparison to pixel-based methods. In this study, an approach is developed to detect new landslides using bitemporal Resoursesat-2 LISS-IV multispectral images (5.8 m) with objects extracted from the post-landslide image by the Multi resolution segmentation (MRS) technique. A new tool developed using Python script, systematically created tiles of the input data to a user defined grid, and thus facilitated efficient analysis of large volume of high resolution satellite data. Combined use of spectral parameters such as top of atmosphere reflectance, green normalised difference vegetation index, principal component analysis and morphometric parameters such as slope and drainage derived from a 10 m digital elevation model resulted in 80.9 % detection accuracy of new landslides. Further, a low branching factor (0.09) shows that less false positives were identified by OBCD indicating the suitability of the method to detect new landslides.

Improving Pixel-Based Change Detection Accuracy Using an Object-Based Approach in Multitemporal SAR Flood Images

Most of existing change detection methods could be classified into three groups, the traditional pixel-based change detection (PBCD), the object-based change detection (OBCD), and the hybrid change detection (HCD). Nevertheless, both PBCD and OBCD have disadvantages, and classical HCD methods belong to intuitive decision-level fusion schemes of PBCD and OBCD. There is no optimum HCD method as of yet. Analyzing the complementarities of PBCD and OBCD method, we propose a new unsupervised algorithm-level fusion scheme (UAFS-HCD) in this paper to improve the accuracy of PBCD using spatial context information through: 1) getting the preliminary change mask with PBCD at first to estimate some parameters for OBCD; 2) deriving the unchanged area mask to eliminate the areas without changes, reducing error amplification phenomenon of OBCD; and 3) obtaining the final change mask by means of OBCD method. Taking flood detection with multitemporal SAR data as an example, we compared the new scheme with some classical methods, including PBCD, OBCD, and HCD method and supervised manual trial-and-error procedure (MTEP). The experimental results of flood detection showed that the new scheme was efficient and robust, and its accuracy sometimes can even exceed MTEP.

THE POSSIBILITIES TO SUPPORT ZB GIS DATABASE UPDATE USING OBJECT-BASED IMAGE ANALYSIS IN ECOGNITION DEVELOPER SOFTWARE

The process of updating a spatial database is a necessary part of database management in order to keep the stored information of an acceptable quality. The first step of database update requires change detection. Many methods have been suggested to detect changes, mostly pixel-based. Recently, with the spread of very high resolution images and object-based image analysis, object-based methods were developed, too. This article presents object-based change detection method for update of the vector database ZB GIS, that is a geometric base of the Slovak National infrastructure of spatial information, using orthophoto of the area of interest. The method stages include the following: segmentation of orthophoto using the geometry of database objects and further according to spectral and spatial information, classification according to ZB GISR, defining reclassification rules between two classes. The proposed method was tested in two localities – Malženice (agricultural landscape) and Chopok-Jasna (mountainous landscape) reaching the overall accuracy of classification 87.12% and 84.55%, respectively. The main limitation of the method is that it can be applied only for polygonal objects.

Object based change detection of Central Asian Tugai vegetation with very high spatial resolution satellite imagery

Ecological restoration of degraded riparian Tugai forests in north-western China is a key driver to combat desertification in this region. Recent restoration efforts attempt to recover the forest along with its most dominant tree species, Populus euphratica. The present research observed the response of natural vegetation using an object based change detection method on QuickBird (2005) and WorldView2 (2011) data. We applied the region growing approach to derived Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) values in order to identify single P. euphratica trees, delineate tree crown areas and quantify crown diameter changes. Results were compared to 59 reference trees. The findings confirmed a positive tree crown growth and suggest a crown diameter increase of 1.14m, on average. On a single tree basis, tree crown diameters of larger crowns were generally underestimated. Small crowns were slightly underestimated in QuickBird and overestimated in Worldview2 images. The results of the automated tree crown delineation show a moderate relation to field reference data with R20052: 0.36 and R20112: 0.48. The object based image analysis (OBIA) method proved to be applicable in sparse riparian Tugai forests and showed great suitability to evaluate ecological restoration efforts in an endangered ecosystem.

Hybrid Object-based Change Detection and Hierarchical Image Segmentation for Thematic Map Updating

A hybrid object-based change detection (OBCD) method incorporating a hierarchical image segmentation strategy and cross-correlation analysis (CCA) is described and demonstrated. The proposed hybrid OBCD method was used to update an existing thematic map derived from Landsat-5 and -7 imagery (circa 2000), with imagery consisting of markedly different sensor specifications (Landsat-2, circa 1976). The proposed hierarchical image segmentation strategy successfully constrained change objects within existing land cover boundaries, avoiding the production of sliver objects, an issue related to other image segmentation strategies used in OBCD. In combination with the CCA method, the hybrid OBCD method is capable of generating change thresholds for individual land-cover classes, providing a mechanism to limit the amount of spurious change detected. Two change threshold methods were tested: (a) change threshold values based on two standard deviations, and, (b) an unsupervised threshold method. No statistically significant difference was found between these threshold methods.

An object-based change detection method accounting for temporal dependences in time series with medium to coarse spatial resolution

Tracking land cover changes using remotely-sensed data contributes to evaluating to what extent human activities impact the environment. Recent studies have pointed out some limitations of single-date comparisons between years and have emphasized the usefulness of time series. However, less effort has hitherto been dedicated to properly account for the temporal dependences typifying the successive images of a time series. An automated change detection method based on a per-object approach and on a probabilistic procedure is proposed here to better cope with this issue. This innovative procedure is applied to a tropical forest environment using high temporal resolution SPOT-VEGETATION time series from 2001 and 2004 in the Brazilian state of Rondônia. The principle of the method is to identify the objects that most deviate from an unchanged reference defined by objective rules. A probabilistic changed-unchanged threshold provides a change map where each object is associated with a likelihood of having changed. This improvement on a binary diagnostic makes the method relevant to meet the requirements of different users, ranging from a comprehensive detection of changes to a detection of the most dramatic changes. According to the threshold value, overall accuracy indices of up to 91% were obtained, with errors involving change omissions for the most part. The isolation of changes within objects was made possible through a segmentation procedure implemented in a temporal context. In addition, the method was formulated so as to differentiate between inter- and intra-annual vegetation dynamics. These technical peculiarities will likely make this analytical framework suitable for detecting changes in environments subject to a strongly marked phenology.

Urban Damage Estimation Using Statistical Processing of Satellite Images

Remotely sensed satellite imagery of an earthquake-affected region can significantly assist in estimating the severity of infrastructure damage. Modern high-resolution satellite systems have been launched to provide users optical imagery with submeter accuracy, which enable the possibility of sensing damage for individual structures by means of pre- and postevent imagery. Recognizing these advancements, herein, we focus our study on the region of Bam, Iran, which was devastated by a moment magnitude Mw=6.6 earthquake on December 26, 2003, causing approximately 43,200 lives lost. The recognition of urban structures within the Bam region is obtained by performing morphological filtering and intensity thresholding, which is further optimized through a statistical procedure. By overlaying the recognized structures with the pre- and postevent images, three object-based change detection methods are presented. The performance of change indices resulting from the three change detection methods is evaluated by means of a histogram-based classification approach. Damage estimation results are presented using easily interpretable maps, wherein individual structures are rendered with colors representing the severity of damage.