Unsupervised SAR Image Change Detection Based on Structural Consistency and CFAR Threshold Estimation

Abstract

Despite the remarkable progress made in recent years, until today, the automatic detection of changes in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images remains a difficult task due to speckle noise. This inherent multiplicative noise tends to increase false alarms and misdetections. As a solution, we developed an unsupervised method that detects SAR changes by analyzing structural differences. By this method, the spatial structure cues of a pixel are represented by a set of similarity weight vectors calculated from the non-local scale of the pixel. The difference image (DI) is then derived by measuring the structural consistency of the corresponding pixels. A new statistical distance that is insensitive to speckle noise was used to measure the similarity weights between patches in order to obtain an accurate structure. It was derived by applying the Nakagami–Rayleigh distribution to a statistical test and customizing the approximation based on change detection. The CFAR threshold estimator in conjunction with the Rayleigh hypothesis was then employed to attenuate the effect of the unimodal histogram of the DI. The results indicated that the proposed method reduces the false alarm rate and improves the kappa and F1-scores, while providing satisfactory visual results.