Automatic change detection using unsupervised saliency guided method with UAV and aerial images

In this paper, an unsupervised saliency guided change detection method using UAV and aerial imagery is proposed. Regions that are more different from other areas are salient, which make them more distinct. The existence of the substantial difference between two images makes saliency proper for guiding the change detection process. Change Vector Analysis (CVA), which has the capability of extracting of overall magnitude and direction of change from multi-spectral and temporal remote sensing data, is used for generating an initial difference image. Combined with an unsupervised CVA and the saliency, Principal Component Analysis (PCA), which is possible to implemented as the guide for change detection method, is proposed for UAV and aerial images. By implementing the saliency generation on the difference map extracted via the CVA, potentially changed areas obtained, and by thresholding the saliency map, most of the interest areas correctly extracted. Finally, the PCA method is implemented to extract features, and K-means clustering is applied to detect changed and unchanged map on the extracted areas. This proposed method is applied to the image sets over the flooded and typhoon-damaged area and is resulted in 95 percent better than the PCA approach compared with manually extracted ground truth for all the data sets. Finally, we compared our approach with the PCA K-means method to show the effectiveness of the method.