Change Detection Using a Texture Feature Space Outlier Index from Mono-Temporal Remote Sensing Images and Vector Data

Abstract

Multi-temporal remote sensing images are the primary sources for change detection. However, it is difficult to obtain comparable multi-temporal images at the same season and time of day with the same sensor. Considering texture homogeneity among objects belonging to the same category, this paper presents a new change detection approach using a texture feature space outlier index from mono-temporal remote sensing images and vector data. In the proposed approach, a texture feature contribution index (TFCI) is defined based on information gain to select the optimal texture features, and a feature space outlier index (FSOI) based on local reachability density is presented to automatically identify outlier samples and changed objects. Our approach includes three steps: (1) the sampling method is designed considering spatial distribution and topographic properties of image objects extracted by segmenting the recent image with existing vector map. (2) Samples with changed categories are refined by an iteration procedure of texture feature selection and outlier sample elimination; and (3) the changed image objects are identified and classified using the refined samples to calculate the FSOI values of the image objects. Three experiments in the two study areas were conducted to validate its performance. Overall accuracies of 95.94%, 96.36%, and 96.28% were achieved, respectively, while the omission and commission errors for every category were all very low. Four widely used methods with two-temporal images were selected for comparison, and the accuracy of the proposed method is higher than theirs. This indicates that our approach is effective and feasible.