This work presents a Bayesian statistical approach to the multimodal change detection (CD) problem in remote sensing imagery. More precisely, we formulate the multimodal CD problem in the unsupervised Markovian framework. The main novelty of the proposed Markovian model lies in the use of an observation field built up from a pixel pairwise modeling and on the bitemporal heterogeneous satellite image pair. Such modeling allows us to rely instead on a robust visual cue, with the appealing property of being quasi-invariant to the imaging (multi-) modality. To use this observation cue as part of a stochastic likelihood model, we first rely on a preliminary iterative estimation technique that takes into account the variety of the laws in the distribution mixture and estimates the parameters of the Markovian mixture model. Once this estimation step is completed, the Maximum a posteriori (MAP) solution of the change detection map, based on the previously estimated parameters, is then computed with a stochastic optimization process. Experimental results and comparisons involving a mixture of different types of imaging modalities confirm the robustness of the proposed approach.

In this paper, we propose a new multimodal change detection in remote sensing. The proposed method is based on a projection of the two multisensor satellite images to a common feature space, in which the two heterogeneous images share the same statistical properties and on which any classical monomodal change detection methods can be applied. This transformation of the before and after images is mainly based on a Multidimensional Scaling(MDS) representation which can be also viewed as a de-texturing approach of the two multisource images. Experimental results involving different types of imaging techniques confirm the reliability of the proposed approach.

Image change detection (CD) is a challenging problem, particularly when images come from different sensors. In this paper, we present a novel and reliable CD model, which is first based on the estimation of a robust similarity-feature map generated from a pair of bitemporal heterogeneous remote sensing images. This similarity-feature map, which is supposed to represent the difference between the multitemporal multisensor images, is herein defined, by specifying a set of linear equality constraints, expressed for each pair of pixels existing in the before-and-after satellite images acquired through different modalities. An estimation of this overconstrained problem, also formulated as a nonlocal pairwise energy-based model, is then carried out, in the least square sense, by a fast linear-complexity algorithm based on a multidimensional scaling mapping technique. Finally, the fusion of different binary segmentation results, obtained from this similarity-feature map by different automatic thresholding algorithms, allows us to precisely and automatically classify the changed and unchanged regions. The proposed method is tested on satellite data sets acquired by real heterogeneous sensor, and the results obtained demonstrate the robustness of the proposed model compared with the best existing state-of-the-art multimodal CD methods recently proposed in the literature.