Probabilistic three-pass SAR Coherent Change Detection

Coherent Change Detection (CCD) is a powerful technique for detecting fine scene changes between two Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images taken at different times. SAR CCD imagery can detect ground disturbances caused by vehicles or other activities that are invisible in optical or traditional SAR imagery [1]. One problem with the extreme sensitivity of CCD is the presence of false alarms (clutter) introduced by phenomena such as low SNR (esp. radar shadows) and vegetation [2]. This paper proposes a method for combining two CCD images, generated from three SAR passes of the same area, to cancel out false alarm regions and show only changes from man-made activities of interest, such as vehicle tracks.