Sparsity-Driven Change Detection in Multitemporal SAR Images

In this letter, a method for detecting changes in multitemporal synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images by minimizing a novel cost function is proposed. This cost function is constructed with log-ratio-based data fidelity terms and an l(1)-norm-based total variation (TV) regularization term. Log-ratio terms model the changes between the two SAR images where the TV regularization term imposes smoothness on these changes in a sparse manner such that fine details are extracted while effects like speckle noise are reduced. The proposed method, sparsity-driven change detection (SDCD), employs accurate approximation techniques for the minimization of the cost function since data fidelity terms are not convex and the employed l(1)-norm TV regularization term is not differentiable. The performance of the SDCD is shown on real-world SAR images obtained from various SAR sensors.