Detection of changed buildings in multitemporal Very High Resolution SAR images

This paper presents an approach to the detection of changed buildings using multitemporal Very High Resolution (VHR) Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images. The proposed approach is based on two concepts i) the extraction of information on changes associated with increase and decrease of backscattering at the optimal building scale; and ii) the exploitation of the expected backscattering proprieties of buildings to detect new and fully destroyed buildings with their grade of reliability. Experimental results obtained on a dataset made up of two COSMO-SkyMed (CSK©) spotlight images acquired in 2009 over the city of L´Aquila (Italy) before and after an earthquake demonstrated that the proposed approach allows an effective identification of destroyed buildings.