Multitemporal Image Change Detection Using Undecimated Discrete Wavelet Transform and Active Contours

In this paper, an unsupervised change detection method for satellite images is proposed. Owing to its robustness against noise, the undecimated discrete wavelet transform is exploited to obtain a multiresolution representation of the difference image, which is obtained from two satellite images acquired from the same geographical area but at different time instances. A region-based active contour model is then applied to the multiresolution representation of the difference image for segmenting the difference image into the “changed” and “unchanged” regions. The proposed change detection method has been conducted on two types of image data sets, i.e., the synthetic aperture radar images and the optical images. The change detection results are compared with several state-of-the-art techniques. The extensive simulation results clearly show that the proposed change detection method consistently yields superior performance.