K-Matrix: A Novel Change-Pattern Mining Method for SAR Image Time Series

In this paper, we present a novel method for change-pattern mining in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image time series based on a distance matrix clustering algorithm, called K-Matrix. As it is different from the state-of-the-art methods, which analyze the SAR image time series based on the change detection matrix (CDM), here, we directly use the distance matrix to determine changed pixels and extract change patterns. The proposed scheme involves two steps: change detection in SAR image time series and change-pattern discovery. First, these distance matrices are constructed for each spatial position over the time series by a dissimilarity measurement. The changed pixels are detected by using a thresholding algorithm on the energy feature map of all distance matrices. Then, according to the change detection results in SAR image time series, the changed areas for pattern mining are determined. Finally, the proposed K-Matrix algorithm which clusters distance matrices by the matrix cross-correlation similarity is used to group all changed pixels into different change patterns. Experimental results on two datasets of TerraSAR-X image time series illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.