Interactive satellite image change detection

With the rapid growth of satellite image collections there is an urgent need for automatic solutions that handle different applications. Change detection is one of these applications that recently received a particular attention but fully automatic solutions are still sensitive to the presence of many irrelevant changes (due to illumination, noise, etc.) as well as untargeted changes. In this paper, we introduce an alternative and semi-automatic change detection method based on relevance feedback. The proposed algorithm is interactive and based on a query and answer (Q&A) model that asks the user the most informative questions about the relevance of his targeted changes, and according to these answers updates change detection results. Experiments conducted on large satellite images, show that indeed the approach is accurate and allows the user to find almost all his targeted changes while discarding the untargeted ones, with a negligible interaction effort.