ADVANCES IN DETECTING CHANGES AT NUCLEAR FACILITIES USING VERY HIGH-RESOLUTION OPTICAL SATELLITE IMAGERY

Under the Additional Protocol of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) complementing the safeguards agreements between States and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), commercial satellite imagery is an important source of information within safeguards that are fully information-driven. Satellite imagery can assist in the evaluation of site declarations, the detection of undeclared nuclear facilities, and the preparation of inspections or other visits. For analyzing and assessing the development of sites under construction (whether declared or not) and for monitoring clandestine facilities, multitemporal satellite imagery acquired over the same area at different times is needed. In remote sensing processing, the comparison of two or more images acquired at different times in order to identify significant changes of or at the earth’s surface is known as change detection. In the last decade several approaches for change detection have evolved and evaluated with regard to their suitability as to safeguards purposes. The aim of this paper is to further investigate the potential of object-based change detection using two images acquired over the same area. In addition, also methods for assessing a series of satellite imagery acquired over the same area, the so-called time series analysis, will be evaluated