A Fractal Projection and Markovian Segmentation-Based Approach for Multimodal Change Detection

Change detection in heterogeneous bitemporal satellite images has become an emerging, important, and challenging research topic in remote sensing for rapid damage assessment. In this article, we explore a new parametric mapping strategy based on a modified geometric fractal decomposition and a contractive mapping approach allowing us to project the before image on any after imaging modality type. This projection exploits the fact that any satellite image data can be approximatively encoded in terms of spatial self-similarities at different scales and this property remains quite invariant to a given imaging modality type. Once the projection is performed and that a pixelwise difference map between the two images (presented in the same imaging modality) is then binarized in the unsupervised Bayesian framework. At this stage, we will test several parameter estimation procedures combined with several segmentation strategies based on different Bayesian cost functions. The experiments for change detection, with real images showing different multimodalities and changed events, indicate that this new fractal-based projection method, which is entirely based on a series of structural and spatial information, is an interesting alternative to classical regression-based projection methods (based only on luminance transformation). Besides, the experiments also show that the difference map, resulting in this novel projection strategy, is also particularly amenable for an unsupervised Markovian binarization approach.