Unsupervised Change Detection in SAR Image Based on Gauss-Log Ratio Image Fusion and Compressed Projection

Abstract

Multitemporal synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images have been successfully used for the detection of different types of terrain changes. SAR image change detection has recently become a challenge problem due to the existence of speckle and the complex mixture of terrain environment. This paper presents a novel unsupervised change detection method in SAR images based on image fusion strategy and compressed projection. First, a Gauss-log ratio operator is proposed to generate a difference image. In order to obtain a better difference map, image fusion strategy is applied using complementary information from Gauss-log ratio and log-ratio difference image. Second, nonsubsampled contourlet transform (NSCT) is used to reduce the noise of the fused difference image, and compressed projection is employed to extract feature for each pixel. The final change detection map is obtained by partitioning the feature vectors into “changed” and “unchanged” classes using simple k-means clustering. Experiment results show that the proposed method is effective for SAR image change detection in terms of shape preservation of the detected change portion and the numerical results.