Bayesian change detection based on spatial sampling and Gaussian mixture model

A Gaussian mixture model (GMM) and Bayesian inferencing based unsupervised change detection algorithm is proposed to achieve change detection on the difference image computed from satellite images of the same scene acquired at different time instances. Each pixel of the difference image is represented by a feature vector constructed from the difference image values of the neighbouring pixels to consider the contextual information. The feature vectors of the difference image are modelled as a GMM. The conditional posterior probabilities of changed and unchanged pixel classes are automatically estimated by partitioning GMM into two distributions by minimizing an objective function. Bayesian inferencing is then employed to segment the difference image into changed and unchanged classes by using the conditional posterior probability of each class. Change detection results are shown on real datasets. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.