Paper
20 October 2015 Feature extraction for change analysis in SAR time series
Markus Boldt, Antje Thiele, Karsten Schulz, Stefan Hinz
Author Affiliations +
Abstract
In remote sensing, the change detection topic represents a broad field of research. If time series data is available, change detection can be used for monitoring applications. These applications require regular image acquisitions at identical time of day along a defined period. Focusing on remote sensing sensors, radar is especially well-capable for applications requiring regularity, since it is independent from most weather and atmospheric influences. Furthermore, regarding the image acquisitions, the time of day plays no role due to the independence from daylight.

Since 2007, the German SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) satellite TerraSAR-X (TSX) permits the acquisition of high resolution radar images capable for the analysis of dense built-up areas. In a former study, we presented the change analysis of the Stuttgart (Germany) airport. The aim of this study is the categorization of detected changes in the time series. This categorization is motivated by the fact that it is a poor statement only to describe where and when a specific area has changed. At least as important is the statement about what has caused the change. The focus is set on the analysis of so-called high activity areas (HAA) representing areas changing at least four times along the investigated period. As first step for categorizing these HAAs, the matching HAA changes (blobs) have to be identified. Afterwards, operating in this object-based blob level, several features are extracted which comprise shape-based, radiometric, statistic, morphological values and one context feature basing on a segmentation of the HAAs. This segmentation builds on the morphological differential attribute profiles (DAPs).

Seven context classes are established: Urban, infrastructure, rural stable, rural unstable, natural, water and unclassified. A specific HA blob is assigned to one of these classes analyzing the CovAmCoh time series signature of the surrounding segments. In combination, also surrounding GIS information is included to verify the CovAmCoh based context assignment. In this paper, the focus is set on the features extracted for a later change categorization procedure.
© (2015) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.
Markus Boldt, Antje Thiele, Karsten Schulz, and Stefan Hinz "Feature extraction for change analysis in SAR time series", Proc. SPIE 9644, Earth Resources and Environmental Remote Sensing/GIS Applications VI, 964410 (20 October 2015); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2193763
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CITATIONS
Cited by 2 scholarly publications.
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KEYWORDS
Feature extraction

Synthetic aperture radar

Image segmentation

Remote sensing

Geographic information systems

Radar

Image acquisition

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