Application of log-cumulants to the detection of spatiotemporal discontinuities in multitemporal SAR images

Multitemporal satellite synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images are a useful source of information for geophysicists to monitor changing regions. In this paper, a new approach is proposed to extract from multitemporal SAR images two kinds of information: temporal changes (flooded areas, coastline erosion, etc.) and stable spatial features (roads, rivers, etc.). The novelty of the proposed approach is to detect simultaneously these two kinds of discontinuities. In a first step, the contrast and the heterogeneity information is extracted by a "multitemporal" application of the ratio of local means and by new three-dimensional texture parameters based on the log-cumulants. In a second step, the resulting attributes that measure the time variability or the presence of spatial features are merged. An interactive fuzzy fusion approach is proposed to provide end-users with a simple and easily understandable tool for tuning the change-detection results. The performances of the proposed attributes and fusion technique are presented on a set of seven multitemporal SAR images acquired by the European Remote Sensing (ERS-1) satellite.