Change detection using distance-based algorithms between synthetic aperture radar polarimetric decompositions

Citation

Najafi A, Hasanlou M & Akbari V (2019) Change detection using distance-based algorithms between synthetic aperture radar polarimetric decompositions. International Journal of Remote Sensing, 40 (15), pp. 6084-6097. https://doi.org/10.1080/01431161.2019.1587202

Abstract
The present study introduces distance based change detection (CD) algorithms in polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) data. PolSAR images, due to interactions between electromagnetic waves and target and because of the high spatial resolution, can be used to study changes in the Earth’s surface. The purpose of this paper is to use features extracted from the fully-polarimetry imaging radar that involved Yamaguchi four-component and H/A/α decomposition based on the distance between the vectors of features for CD. We first extract features from polarimetric decompositions of multi-looked covariance (or coherency) matrix data. We then use two well-known distance measures namely Canberra and Euclidean distances for measuring the similarity between the vectors of polarimetric decompositions at different times. Assessment of incorporated methods is performed using different criteria, such as overall accuracy, area under the receiver operating characteristic curve, and false alarms rate. The results of the experiments show that Canberra distance has better performance with high overall accuracy and low false alarm rate than Euclidean distance and other compared algorithms to detect changes.

Journal
International Journal of Remote Sensing: Volume 40, Issue 15