A new patch based change detector for polarimetric SAR data

• A new ENL estimator is proposed for the PolSAR/SAR data filtered by NLM filter.
• The distribution of the residual speckle in the filtered data is utilized.
• The proposed method is more efficient than the existing PolSAR change detectors.

In this paper, a patch based change detection method for polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) data is proposed. Because of the inherent speckle interference in SAR system, a despeckling procedure is important for change detection. However, the residual speckle still exists in the filtered data and is unevenly distributed, which is not considered in the available change detectors. Besides that, the detection methods with despeckling procedure cannot be adjusted based on the constant false alarm rate (CFAR). Specifically, the available PolSAR change detection methods are inefficient for the strong speckle interference cases due to the absence of the despeckling procedure. In order to overcome these drawbacks, an improved change detection framework for PolSAR data is proposed in this paper. The main innovations in the new framework include: (1) a despeckling procedure is added for PolSAR change detection, which makes the algorithm robust to strong noise; (2) a new equivalent number of looks (ENL) estimator is proposed for the PolSAR/SAR data filtered by non-local means filter; (3) the proposed method which detects the changes based on the filtered data can be adjusted with different CFARs. The experiments on both synthetic and real PolSAR datasets have demonstrated that the effectiveness of the proposed patch based PolSAR change detector (PPCD).