Automatic analysis of the difference image for unsupervised change detection

One of the main problems related to unsupervised change detection methods based on the “difference image” lies in the lack of efficient automatic techniques for discriminating between changed and unchanged pixels in the difference image. Such discrimination is usually performed by using empirical strategies or manual trial-and-error procedures, which affect both the accuracy and the reliability of the change-detection process. To overcome such drawbacks, in this paper, we propose two automatic techniques (based on the Bayes theory) for the analysis of the difference image. One allows an automatic selection of the decision threshold that minimizes the overall change detection error probability under the assumption that pixels in the difference image are independent of one another. The other analyzes the difference image by considering the spatial-contextual information included in the neighborhood of each pixel. In particular, an approach based on Markov Random Fields (MRF’s) that exploits interpixel class dependency contexts is presented. Both proposed techniques require the knowledge of the statistical distributions of the changed and unchanged pixels in the difference image. To perform an unsupervised estimation of the statistical terms that characterize these distributions, we propose an iterative method based on the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm. Experimental results confirm the effectiveness of both proposed techniques.