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

A Tutorial on Speckle Reduction in Synthetic Aperture Radar Images

Speckle is a granular disturbance, usually modeled as a multiplicative noise, that affects synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images, as well as all coherent images. Over the last three decades, several methods have been proposed for the reduction of speckle, or despeckling, in SAR images. Goal of this paper is making a comprehensive review of despeckling methods since their birth, over thirty years ago, highlighting trends and changing approaches over years. The concept of fully developed speckle is explained. Drawbacks of homomorphic filtering are pointed out. Assets of multiresolution despeckling, as opposite to spatial-domain despeckling, are highlighted. Also advantages of undecimated, or stationary, wavelet transforms over decimated ones are discussed. Bayesian estimators and probability density function (pdf) models in both spatial and multiresolution domains are reviewed. Scale-space varying pdf models, as opposite to scale varying models, are promoted. Promising methods following non-Bayesian approaches, like nonlocal (NL) filtering and total variation (TV) regularization, are reviewed and compared to spatial- and wavelet-domain Bayesian filters. Both established and new trends for assessment of despeckling are presented. A few experiments on simulated data and real COSMO-SkyMed SAR images highlight, on one side the costperformance tradeoff of the different methods, on the other side the effectiveness of solutions purposely designed for SAR heterogeneity and not fully developed speckle. Eventually, upcoming methods based on new concepts of signal processing, like compressive sensing, are foreseen as a new generation of despeckling, after spatial-domain and multiresolution-domain method

Advances in Sonar Technology

The demand to explore the largest and also one of the richest parts of our planet, the advances in signal processing promoted by an exponential growth in computation power and a thorough study of sound propagation in the underwater realm, have lead to remarkable advances in sonar technology in the last years.The work on hand is a sum of knowledge of several authors who contributed in various aspects of sonar technology. This book intends to give a broad overview of the advances in sonar technology of the last years that resulted from the research effort of the authors in both sonar systems and their applications. It is intended for scientist and engineers from a variety of backgrounds and even those that never had contact with sonar technology before will find an easy introduction with the topics and principles exposed here

Sensor Signal and Information Processing II

In the current age of information explosion, newly invented technological sensors and software are now tightly integrated with our everyday lives. Many sensor processing algorithms have incorporated some forms of computational intelligence as part of their core framework in problem solving. These algorithms have the capacity to generalize and discover knowledge for themselves and learn new information whenever unseen data are captured. The primary aim of sensor processing is to develop techniques to interpret, understand, and act on information contained in the data. The interest of this book is in developing intelligent signal processing in order to pave the way for smart sensors. This involves mathematical advancement of nonlinear signal processing theory and its applications that extend far beyond traditional techniques. It bridges the boundary between theory and application, developing novel theoretically inspired methodologies targeting both longstanding and emergent signal processing applications. The topic ranges from phishing detection to integration of terrestrial laser scanning, and from fault diagnosis to bio-inspiring filtering. The book will appeal to established practitioners, along with researchers and students in the emerging field of smart sensors processing

Détection de changement par fusion d'images de télédétection de résolutions et modalités différentes

La détection de changements dans une scène est l’un des problèmes les plus complexes en télédétection. Il s’agit de détecter des modifications survenues dans une zone géographique donnée par comparaison d’images de cette zone acquises à différents instants. La comparaison est facilitée lorsque les images sont issues du même type de capteur c’est-à-dire correspondent à la même modalité (le plus souvent optique multi-bandes) et possèdent des résolutions spatiales et spectrales identiques. Les techniques de détection de changements non supervisées sont, pour la plupart, conçues spécifiquement pour ce scénario. Il est, dans ce cas, possible de comparer directement les images en calculant la différence de pixels homologues, c’est-à-dire correspondant au même emplacement au sol. Cependant, dans certains cas spécifiques tels que les situations d’urgence, les missions ponctuelles, la défense et la sécurité, il peut s’avérer nécessaire d’exploiter des images de modalités et de résolutions différentes. Cette hétérogénéité dans les images traitées introduit des problèmes supplémentaires pour la mise en œuvre de la détection de changements. Ces problèmes ne sont pas traités par la plupart des méthodes de l’état de l’art. Lorsque la modalité est identique mais les résolutions différentes, il est possible de se ramener au scénario favorable en appliquant des prétraitements tels que des opérations de rééchantillonnage destinées à atteindre les mêmes résolutions spatiales et spectrales. Néanmoins, ces prétraitements peuvent conduire à une perte d’informations pertinentes pour la détection de changements. En particulier, ils sont appliqués indépendamment sur les deux images et donc ne tiennent pas compte des relations fortes existant entre les deux images. L’objectif de cette thèse est de développer des méthodes de détection de changements qui exploitent au mieux l’information contenue dans une paire d’images observées, sans condition sur leur modalité et leurs résolutions spatiale et spectrale. Les restrictions classiquement imposées dans l’état de l’art sont levées grâce à une approche utilisant la fusion des deux images observées. La première stratégie proposée s’applique au cas d’images de modalités identiques mais de résolutions différentes. Elle se décompose en trois étapes. La première étape consiste à fusionner les deux images observées ce qui conduit à une image de la scène à haute résolution portant l’information des changements éventuels. La deuxième étape réalise la prédiction de deux images non observées possédant des résolutions identiques à celles des images observées par dégradation spatiale et spectrale de l’image fusionnée. Enfin, la troisième étape consiste en une détection de changements classique entre images observées et prédites de mêmes résolutions. Une deuxième stratégie modélise les images observées comme des versions dégradées de deux images non observées caractérisées par des résolutions spectrales et spatiales identiques et élevées. Elle met en œuvre une étape de fusion robuste qui exploite un a priori de parcimonie des changements observés. Enfin, le principe de la fusion est étendu à des images de modalités différentes. Dans ce cas où les pixels ne sont pas directement comparables, car correspondant à des grandeurs physiques différentes, la comparaison est réalisée dans un domaine transformé. Les deux images sont représentées par des combinaisons linéaires parcimonieuses des éléments de deux dictionnaires couplés, appris à partir des données. La détection de changements est réalisée à partir de l’estimation d’un code couplé sous condition de parcimonie spatiale de la différence des codes estimés pour chaque image. L’expérimentation de ces différentes méthodes, conduite sur des changements simulés de manière réaliste ou sur des changements réels, démontre les avantages des méthodes développées et plus généralement de l’apport de la fusion pour la détection de changement