A Hierarchical Approach to Change Detection in Very High Resolution SAR Images for Surveillance Applications

The availability of very high resolution (VHR) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images, which can be acquired by satellites over the same geographical area with short repetition interval, makes the development of effective unsupervised change detection (CD) techniques very important. This paper proposes a hierarchical approach to CD in VHR SAR images for addressing surveillance applications, where VHR data are acquired with high temporal resolution (e.g., one image every few days). The proposed approach is based on two concepts: 1) exploitation of a multiscale technique for a preliminary detection of areas containing changes in backscattering at different scales (hot spots) and 2) explicit modeling of the semantic meaning of changes by using both the intrinsic SAR image properties (e.g., acquisition geometry and scattering mechanisms) and the available prior information. In order to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, a problem of freight traffic surveillance is addressed considering two data sets. Each of them is made up of a pair of multitemporal VHR SAR images acquired by the COSMO-SkyMed (COnstellation of small Satellites for the Mediterranean basin Observation) constellation in spotlight mode. Each data set defines a complex CD problem due to both the presence of a variety of changes on the ground and the complexity of object backscattering. Experimental results point out the effectiveness of the proposed approach.