A new land-cover match-based change detection for hyperspectral imagery

The presence of phenomena such as earthquakes, floods and artificial human activities causes changes on the Earth's surface. Change detection (CD) is an essential tool for the monitoring and managing of resources on local and global scales. Hyperspectral imagery can provide more detailed results for detecting changes in land-cover types. The main objective of this paper is to present a new, supervised CD method by combining similarity-based and distance-based methods to increase the efficiency of already existing CD approaches. The proposed method applies in two phases and uses three different algorithms, including image differencing, modified Z-score analysis and spectral angle mapper. The efficiency of the presented method is evaluated using Hyperion multi-temporal hyperspectral imagery. The receiver-operating characteristic curve index is used for assessing and comparing the results. The results clearly demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method for the detection and production of more accurate change maps. Furthermore, the proposed method is also able to detect changes with an accuracy of more than 96%, a false alarm rate lower than 0.03 and an area under the curve of about 0.986 in overall comparison to other conventional CD techniques. In addition, this method achieved an optimal threshold value with more rapid convergence.