A Detail-Preserving Scale-Driven Approach to Unsupervised Change Detection in Multitemporal SAR Images

This paper presents a novel approach to change detection in multitemporal synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. The proposed approach exploits a wavelet-based multiscale decomposition of the log-ratio image (obtained by a comparison of the original multitemporal data) aimed at achieving different scales (levels) of representation of the change signal. Each scale is characterized by a different tradeoff between speckle reduction and preservation of geometrical details. For each pixel, a subset of reliable scales is identified on the basis of a local statistic measure applied to scale-dependent log-ratio images. The final change-detection result is obtained according to an adaptive scale-driven fusion algorithm. Experimental results obtained on multitemporal SAR images acquired by the ERS-1 satellite confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach. © 2005 IEEE.