Satellite mapping of the demolition of the rocky flats nuclear weapons plant

We present two different change detection techniques to monitor surface changes that occurred at the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons facility located immediately to the North West of the city of Denver, Colorado, USA. The site started being cleaned up and dismantled in 1998 and was completed in 2005. The first Change Detection method is based on a Maximum Likelihood classifier, while the other is an approach based on a Neural Network architecture called NAHIRI (Neural Architecture for High-Resolution Imagery) to produce change detection maps from very high-resolution satellite imagery. NAHIRI simultaneously exploits spectral and temporal information by adding a filter, directly stemming from the multi- temporal information, to the classification changes derived from the multi-spectral data. In fact, the distinctive feature of this method is that the NNs exploit both the multi-spectral and the multi-temporal information in parallel that are associated with the changed values of the pixel spectral reflectances. The quantitative results are analyzed in order to single out advantages and shortcomings of the two different approaches.