A robust nonlinear scale space change detection approach for SAR images

In this paper, we propose a change detection approach based on nonlinear scale space analysis of change images for robust detection of various changes incurred by natural phenomena and/or human activities in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images using Maximally Stable Extremal Regions (MSERs). To achieve this, a variant of the log-ratio image of multitemporal images is calculated which is followed by Feature Preserving Despeckling (FPD) to generate nonlinear scale space images exhibiting different trade-offs in terms of speckle reduction and shape detail preservation. MSERs of each scale space image are found and then combined through a decision level fusion strategy, namely "selective scale fusion" (SSF), where contrast and boundary curvature of each MSER are considered. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated using real multitemporal high resolution TerraSAR-X images and synthetically generated multitemporal images composed of shapes with several orientations, sizes, and backscatter amplitude levels representing a variety of possible signatures of change. One of the main outcomes of this approach is that different objects having different sizes and levels of contrast with their surroundings appear as stable regions at different scale space images thus the fusion of results from scale space images yields a good overall performance

Unsupervised multi-scale change detection from SAR imagery for monitoring natural and anthropogenic disasters

Thesis (Ph.D.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2017Radar remote sensing can play a critical role in operational monitoring of natural and anthropogenic disasters. Despite its all-weather capabilities, and its high performance in mapping, and monitoring of change, the application of radar remote sensing in operational monitoring activities has been limited. This has largely been due to: (1) the historically high costs associated with obtaining radar data; (2) slow data processing, and delivery procedures; and (3) the limited temporal sampling that was provided by spaceborne radar-based satellites. Recent advances in the capabilities of spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) sensors have developed an environment that now allows for SAR to make significant contributions to disaster monitoring. New SAR processing strategies that can take full advantage of these new sensor capabilities are currently being developed. Hence, with this PhD dissertation, I aim to: (i) investigate unsupervised change detection techniques that can reliably extract signatures from time series of SAR images, and provide the necessary flexibility for application to a variety of natural, and anthropogenic hazard situations; (ii) investigate effective methods to reduce the effects of speckle and other noise on change detection performance; (iii) automate change detection algorithms using probabilistic Bayesian inferencing; and (iv) ensure that the developed technology is applicable to current, and future SAR sensors to maximize temporal sampling of a hazardous event. This is achieved by developing new algorithms that rely on image amplitude information only, the sole image parameter that is available for every single SAR acquisition. The motivation and implementation of the change detection concept are described in detail in Chapter 3. In the same chapter, I demonstrated the technique's performance using synthetic data as well as a real-data application to map wildfire progression. I applied Radiometric Terrain Correction (RTC) to the data to increase the sampling frequency, while the developed multiscaledriven approach reliably identified changes embedded in largely stationary background scenes. With this technique, I was able to identify the extent of burn scars with high accuracy. I further applied the application of the change detection technology to oil spill mapping. The analysis highlights that the approach described in Chapter 3 can be applied to this drastically different change detection problem with only little modification. While the core of the change detection technique remained unchanged, I made modifications to the pre-processing step to enable change detection from scenes of continuously varying background. I introduced the Lipschitz regularity (LR) transformation as a technique to normalize the typically dynamic ocean surface, facilitating high performance oil spill detection independent of environmental conditions during image acquisition. For instance, I showed that LR processing reduces the sensitivity of change detection performance to variations in surface winds, which is a known limitation in oil spill detection from SAR. Finally, I applied the change detection technique to aufeis flood mapping along the Sagavanirktok River. Due to the complex nature of aufeis flooded areas, I substituted the resolution-preserving speckle filter used in Chapter 3 with curvelet filters. In addition to validating the performance of the change detection results, I also provide evidence of the wealth of information that can be extracted about aufeis flooding events once a time series of change detection information was extracted from SAR imagery. A summary of the developed change detection techniques is conducted and suggested future work is presented in Chapter 6

Anomaly and Change Detection in Remote Sensing Images

Earth observation through satellite sensors, models and in situ measurements provides a way to monitor our planet with unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution. The amount and diversity of the data which is recorded and made available is ever-increasing. This data allows us to perform crop yield prediction, track land-use change such as deforestation, monitor and respond to natural disasters and predict and mitigate climate change. The last two decades have seen a large increase in the application of machine learning algorithms in Earth observation in order to make efficient use of the growing data-stream. Machine learning algorithms, however, are typically model agnostic and too flexible and so end up not respecting fundamental laws of physics. On the other hand there has, in recent years, been an increase in research attempting to embed physics knowledge in machine learning algorithms in order to obtain interpretable and physically meaningful solutions. The main objective of this thesis is to explore different ways of encoding physical knowledge to provide machine learning methods tailored for specific problems in remote sensing.Ways of expressing expert knowledge about the relevant physical systems in remote sensing abound, ranging from simple relations between reflectance indices and biophysical parameters to complex models that compute the radiative transfer of electromagnetic radiation through our atmosphere, and differential equations that explain the dynamics of key parameters. This thesis focuses on inversion problems, emulation of radiative transfer models, and incorporation of the above-mentioned domain knowledge in machine learning algorithms for remote sensing applications. We explore new methods that can optimally model simulated and in-situ data jointly, incorporate differential equations in machine learning algorithms, handle more complex inversion problems and large-scale data, obtain accurate and computationally efficient emulators that are consistent with physical models, and that efficiently perform approximate Bayesian inversion over radiative transfer models

Semi-supervised and unsupervised kernel-based novelty detection with application to remote sensing images

The main challenge of new information technologies is to retrieve intelligible information from the large volume of digital data gathered every day. Among the variety of existing data sources, the satellites continuously observing the surface of the Earth are key to the monitoring of our environment. The new generation of satellite sensors are tremendously increasing the possibilities of applications but also increasing the need for efficient processing methodologies in order to extract information relevant to the users' needs in an automatic or semi-automatic way. This is where machine learning comes into play to transform complex data into simplified products such as maps of land-cover changes or classes by learning from data examples annotated by experts. These annotations, also called labels, may actually be difficult or costly to obtain since they are established on the basis of ground surveys. As an example, it is extremely difficult to access a region recently flooded or affected by wildfires. In these situations, the detection of changes has to be done with only annotations from unaffected regions. In a similar way, it is difficult to have information on all the land-cover classes present in an image while being interested in the detection of a single one of interest. These challenging situations are called novelty detection or one-class classification in machine learning. In these situations, the learning phase has to rely only on a very limited set of annotations, but can exploit the large set of unlabeled pixels available in the images. This setting, called semi-supervised learning, allows significantly improving the detection. In this Thesis we address the development of methods for novelty detection and one-class classification with few or no labeled information. The proposed methodologies build upon the kernel methods, which take place within a principled but flexible framework for learning with data showing potentially non-linear feature relations. The thesis is divided into two parts, each one having a different assumption on the data structure and both addressing unsupervised (automatic) and semi-supervised (semi-automatic) learning settings. The first part assumes the data to be formed by arbitrary-shaped and overlapping clusters and studies the use of kernel machines, such as Support Vector Machines or Gaussian Processes. An emphasis is put on the robustness to noise and outliers and on the automatic retrieval of parameters. Experiments on multi-temporal multispectral images for change detection are carried out using only information from unchanged regions or none at all. The second part assumes high-dimensional data to lie on multiple low dimensional structures, called manifolds. We propose a method seeking a sparse and low-rank representation of the data mapped in a non-linear feature space. This representation allows us to build a graph, which is cut into several groups using spectral clustering. For the semi-supervised case where few labels of one class of interest are available, we study several approaches incorporating the graph information. The class labels can either be propagated on the graph, constrain spectral clustering or used to train a one-class classifier regularized by the given graph. Experiments on the unsupervised and oneclass classification of hyperspectral images demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches

Multiscale change detection in multitemporal satellite images

10.1109/LGRS.2009.2026188IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters64820-82