Unsupervised Change Detection using Thin Cloud-Contaminated Landsat Images

In this paper, a novel unsupervised change detection method is proposed to automatically detect changes between two cloud-contaminated Landsat images. To achieve this, firstly, a photometric invariants technique with Stationary Wavelet Transform (SWT) are applied to input images to decrease the influence of cloud and noise artifacts in the change detection process. Then, mean shift image filtering is employed on the sub-band difference images, generated via image differencing technique, to smooth the images. Next, multiple binary change detection masks are obtained by partitioning the pixels in each of the smoothed sub-band difference images into two clusters using Fuzzy c-means (FCM). Finally, the binary masks are fused using Markov Random Field (MRF) to generate the final solution. Experiments on both semi-simulated and real data sets show the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed change detection method in noisy and cloud-contaminated Landsat images. © 2018 IEEE.