A SAR INTENSITY IMAGES CHANGE DETECTION METHOD BASED ON FUSION DIFFERENCE DETECTOR AND STATISTICAL PROPERTIES

Abstract. Detecting the land cover changes is an important application of multi-temporal synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. This study puts forward a novel SAR change detection method which has two-steps: change detector construction and change threshold selection. For change detector construction, considering the SAR intensity images follow the gamma distribution, the conditional probabilities of the binary hypothesis test are provided, then the log likelihood ratio (LLR) combined with the log ratio (LR) to construct a detector which can enhance the degree of change to calculate the diversity degree convenient between the two images; for change threshold selection, owing to the characteristic that the curve about the ratio value of adjacent grey-level (GL) values in normalized difference map, the normalized difference map can be segmented in three parts by two thresholds selected which correspond to the regions of unchanged, backscatter enhanced and weakened separately. And as this, the change areas can be also determined simultaneously. The experimental results on different areas and sensors indicate that the proposed algorithm is effective and feasible.