Research Article Multiscale Region-Level VHR Image Change Detection via Sparse Change Descriptor and Robust Discriminative Dictionary Learning

Copyright © 2015 Yuan Xu et al.This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Very high resolution (VHR) image change detection is challenging due to the low discriminative ability of change feature and the difficulty of change decision in utilizing the multilevel contextual information. Most change feature extraction techniques put emphasis on the change degree description (i.e., in what degree the changes have happened), while they ignore the change pattern description (i.e., how the changes changed), which is of equal importance in characterizing the change signatures. Moreover, the simultaneous consideration of the classification robust to the registration noise and the multiscale region-consistent fusion is often neglected in change decision. To overcome such drawbacks, in this paper, a novel VHR image change detectionmethod is proposed based on sparse change descriptor and robust discriminative dictionary learning. Sparse change descriptor combines the change degree component and the change pattern component, which are encoded by the sparse representation error and themorphological profile feature, respectively. Robust change decision is conducted by multiscale region-consistent fusion, which is implemented by the superpixel-level cosparse representation with robust discriminative dictionary and the conditional random field model. Experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed change detection technique. 1