Probabilistic Change Detection Framework for Analyzing Settlement Dynamics Using Very High-resolution Satellite Imagery

Global human population growth and an increasingly urbanizing world have led to rapid changes in human settlement landscapes and patterns. Timely monitoring and assessment of these changes and dissemination of accurate information is important for policy makers, city planners, and humanitarian relief workers. Satellite imagery provides useful data for the aforementioned applications, and remote sensing can be used to identify and quantify change areas. We explore a probabilistic framework to identify changes in human settlements using very high-resolution satellite imagery. As compared to predominantly pixel-based change detection systems which are highly sensitive to image registration errors, our grid (block) based approach is more robust to registration errors. The presented framework is an automated change detection system applicable to both panchromatic and multi-spectral imagery. The detection system provides comprehensible information about change areas, and minimizes the post-detection thresholding procedure often needed in traditional change detection algorithms.