Homological persistence for shape based change detection between Digital Elevation Models

Abstract. Digital Elevation Models provide an accurate description of scenes allowing change detection by radiometric independence measurements. The height information gives access to the changes in the 3D shape of a scene occurring between two dates. In this paper, a procedure to extract meaningful changes is proposed based on analysing this shape variation. Instead of filtering a difference map, a multilevel analysis of the difference map based on the theory of persistence is developed to make such analysis independent from a choice of threshold values.