A MULTILEVEL CONTEXTUAL APPROACH TO CHANGE DETECTION FOR VERY HIGH RESOLUTION IMAGES

A multilevel contextual approach is proposed in this paper for change detection of VHR images. By representing the change features in a hierarchical contextual manner, the changes are detected level-by-level. By taking advantages of SVMs, the ambiguity of changes is mitigated and the optimal changes are detected peculiar to the specific user. Compared to the tradi-tional methods, the proposed approach is more accurate, more robust and faster. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and advantages of the proposed approach. Index Terms — contextual change features, multilevel change detection, scale propagation, coarse-to-fine refine-ment. 1