Sub-pixel change detection for urban land-cover analysis via multi-temporal remote sensing images

摘要

Conventional change detection approaches are mainly based on per-pixel processing,which ignore the sub-pixel spectral variation resulted from spectral mixture.Especially for medium-resolution remote sensing images used in urban landcover change monitoring,land use/cover components within a single pixel are usually complicated and heterogeneous due to the limitation of the spatial resolution.Thus,traditional hard detection methods based on pure pixel assumption may lead to a high level of omission and commission errors inevitably,degrading the overall accuracy of change detection.In order to address this issue and find a possible way to exploit the spectral variation in a sub-pixel level,a novel change detection scheme is designed based on the spectral mixture analysis and decision-level fusion.Nonlinear spectral mixture model is selected for spectral unmixing,and change detection is implemented in a sub-pixel level by investigating the inner-pixel subtle changes and combining multiple composition evidences.The proposed method is tested on multi-temporal Landsat Thematic Mapper and China–Brazil Earth Resources Satellite remote sensing images for the land-cover change detection over urban areas.The effectiveness of the proposed approach is confirmed in terms of several accuracy indices in contrast with two pixel-based change detection methods(i.e.change vector analysis and principal component analysis-based method).In particular,the proposed sub-pixel change detection approach not only provides the binary change information,but also obtains the characterization about change direction and intensity,which greatly extends the semantic meaning of the detected change targets.