Detecting land cover changes in SAR images based on structural information

What is it about?

Structural information, extracted by simulating the human visual system (HVS), is independent of viewing conditions and individual observers. Structural similarity (SSIM), a measure of similarity between two images, has been widely used in image quality assessment. Given the fact that the change detection techniques identify the changed area by the similarity of multi-temporal images, SSIM has significant prospect in change detection of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. However, the experimental results show that SSIM performs worse in change detection of multi-temporal SAR images. In this study, we first propose an advanced SSIM (ASSIM) based on a two-step assumption of extracting structural information and a visual attention measure (VAM) model. Then, we propose a novel approach based on ASSIM for change detection in SAR images.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

Unlike classic methods, this approach exploits the human visual system model to simulate the process that human perceiving the changes occurred in an objective scene and better describe the difference among multi-temporal SAR images. Experimental results show that the proposed method can acquire a better difference image than SSIM and other state-of-the-art methods, and improve the accuracy of change detection in SAR images effectively.