Coherent Change Detection Statistics for Multiple Polarization SAR Images

Given a pair of multiple polarization synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images collected at different times, the basic change detection problem is to determine pixels in the image that have changed during the time between images. A change detection statistic is computed for each pixel in the image to indicate whether a change has occurred. In this paper, we present a generalization of the coherent change detection (CD) statistic used for scalar valued SAR data to multiple polarization SAR data. Our generalized CD statistic is based on a test for statistical independence. We do not make any restrictive assumption regarding the underlying SAR data. A theoretical analysis of change detection performance is presented and comparisons are made with previous work.