Graph matching based change detection in satellite images

Change detection from bitemporal satellite images (taken from the same region in different times) may be used in various applications such as forest monitoring, earthquake damage assessment, and unlawful occupation. There are various approaches, based on different principles, to detect changes from satellite images. In this study, we propose a novel change detection method based on structure information. Therefore, our method can be called as structural change detection. To summarize the structure in an image, we benefit from local features and their graph based representation. Extracting the structure from both images, we benefit from graph matching to detect changes. We tested our method on 18 Ikonos image pairs and discuss its strengths and weaknesses.