Urban monitoring and change detection of central Tokyo using high-resolution X-band SAR images

Urban areas grow and change rapidly all over the world. Hence, regular and up-to-date information on urban changes is required for urban planning and disaster management. In this study, two temporal TerraSAR-X images are used to monitor urban changes. The study area is focused on a part of central Tokyo, Japan. Firstly, the changes between two images are checked by color composition. Then the difference and the correlation coefficient between the two images are calculated with a sliding window. A new factor that combines the difference and the correlation coefficient is proposed to detect changed areas. Finally, two high resolution optical images are introduced to verify the accuracy of the detection results.