A methodology for near real-time change detection between Unmanned Aerial Vehicle and wide area satellite images

In this paper a novel integrated hybrid methodology for unsupervised change detection between Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and satellite images, which can be utilized in various fields like security applications (e.g. border surveillance) and damage assessment, is proposed. This is a challenging problem mainly due to the difference in geographic coverage and the spatial resolution of the two images, as well as to the acquisition modes which lead to misregistration errors. The methodology consists of the following steps: (a) pre-processing, where the part of the satellite image that corresponds to the UAV image is determined and the UAV image is ortho-rectified using information provided by a Digital Terrain Model, (b) the detection of potential changes, which is based exclusively on intensity and image gradient information, (c) the generation of the region map, where homogeneous regions are produced by the previous potential changes via a seeded region growing algorithm and placed on the region map, and (d) the evaluation of the above regions, in order to characterize them as true changes or not. The methodology has been applied on demanding real datasets with very encouraging results. Finally, its robustness to the misregistration errors is assessed via extensive experimentation. (C) 2016 International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, Inc. (ISPRS). Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.