A novel approach to unsupervised change detection based on a semisupervised SVM and a similarity measure

This paper presents a novel approach to unsupervised change detection in multispectral remote-sensing images. The proposed approach aims at extracting the change information by jointly analyzing the spectral channels of multitemporal images in the original feature space without any training data. This is accomplished by using a selective Bayesian thresholding for deriving a pseudotraining set that is necessary for initializing an adequately defined binary semisupervised support vector machine ((SVM)-V-3) classifier. Starting from these initial seeds,the (SVM)-V-3 performs change detection in the original multitemporal feature space by gradually considering unlabeled patterns in the definition of the decision boundary between changed and unchanged pixels according to a semisupervised learning algorithm. This algorithm models the full complexity of the change-detection problem, which is only partially represented from the seed pixels included in the pseudotraining set. The values of the classifier parameters are then defined according to a novel unsupervised model-selection technique based on a similarity measure between change-detection maps obtained with different settings. Experimental results obtained on different multispectral remote-sensing images confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach.