Superpixel-Based PolSAR Images Change Detection
Lei Xie 1, 2, #Hong Zhang 1 , Chao Wang1, Meng Liu 1, Bo Zhang 1
1
Institute of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth, CAS, No.9 Dengzhuang South Road, Haidian District, Beijing 100094, China.
2
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China
E-mail: zhanghong@radi.ac.cn
AbstractPrevious polarimetric synthetic aperture radar
(PolSAR) images change detection methods are generally
undertaken in the pixel scale, resulting in overlooking the
semantic information. To solve this problem, this paper presents
a superpixel-based PolSAR images change detection methods.
Different from some previous methods, an improved SLIC
superpixel segmentation method is introduced in polarimetric
interferometric SAR (Pol-InSAR) images processing, which can
segment two PolSAR images simultaneously. Moreover, along
with the difference maps (DMs) generated based on the complex
wishart distribution and the total intensity, we also use color
information to generate the DM between PolSAR images, which
has long been overlooked in PolSAR images change detection.
Based on the segmentation results and three DMs, two different
change detection schemes are proposed. One is to perform the
majority voting to three change detection results using the above
mentioned DMs. Another is to fuse the three DMs and generate a
refined DM, and the change detection is performed on the refined
DM. Two Radarsat-2 images acquired over Suzhou city, China,
are used in our experiments to validate the proposed methods,
and the experimental results show that the proposed schemes can
improve the change detection results significantly.
Index TermsPol-InSAR segmentation, color information,
change detection
I. INTRODUCTION
Due to rapid urbanization, the land cover types in urban and
sub-urban areas are changing gradually, and the demands for
precise and real-time monitoring of urban changes are also
increasing. Some traditional methods including field survey are
limited by the long time-consumption and small spatial
coverage. On the contrary, remote sensing techniques have the
abilities of frequent and large-scale observation. Therefore,
remote sensing techniques provide an irreplaceable tool for
urban change detection. Compared with the optical remote
sensing sensors, the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) breaks the
limits of cloude coverage and time of day [1]; therefore, the use
of SAR images in urban change detection gains popularity
during the last decade.
Fully Polarimetric (FP) SAR data are relatively powerful in
remote sensing applications than the single- and dual-pol SAR
data because they contain more information. Many change
detection methods using FP SAR data have been explored,
most of them are in the pixel scale, they generally overlook the
semantic information. To solve this problem, scholars
introduced some novel methods, like Markov random field
(MRF)[2], into PolSAR images change detection. Another
strategy to use the contextual information is the object-based
change detection methods[3][4]. Image segmetation is one of
978-1-4673-7297-8/15/$31.00 2015
c IEEE
the most popular methods to generate the objects. In some
previous object-based change detection methods[3][4], the
segmentation methods should be performed to each PolSAR
image and an fusion processing is required to obtain the final
objects. Thus, these methods generally need too much
computation.
The difference map (DM) is used to measure the change
degree and is crucial in change detection. Many methods have
been used to generate the DM, including those based on clutter
distribution models[5] and target decomposition[6]. However,
to the best of our knowledge, the color-based DM is not used
so far. Actually, the color information has long been used in
understanding the PolSAR images, like the Pauli pesudo-color
image. Uhlmann et al. [7] have integrated color features in
PolSAR image classification, and the experimental results
improved greatly compared with that without using color-based
features.
Inspired by previous work, an improved superpixel-based
PolSAR images change detection method is proposed. The
SLIC superpixel segmentation [8] has been used in FP SAR
image segmentation. For change detection, the interferometric
coherency matrix T6 is used instead of the T3 in [8]; therefore,
the PolSAR image pair can be segmented simultaneously.
Additionally, the gradient calculated by the edge detector is
also introduced into the calculation of the distance
measurement in SLIC, which can preserve the edge well. To
take full advantage of PolSAR information, we also use color-
based features to generate the DM. The Pauli images are used
for extracting the color information. Along with the DM
generated based on color information, two other DMs
calculated using the complex wishart distribution model and
the total intensity are also obtained. In general, the changed
areas can be extracted using some threshold segmentation
methods after the generation of DMs. Recently, some scholars
[9] tried to combine different DMs and generated a refined DM.
According to their main ideas, two different object-based
change detection schemes are proposed in this paper, and the
experimental results are compared using the Radarsat-2 images.
II. STUDY SITE AND EXPERIMENTAL DATA
Two Radarsat-2 images acquired over Suzhou city, Jiangsu
province, China, are used in our experiments. The acquisition
dates are April 9, 2009 (master image) and June 15, 2010
(slave image), respectively. The original spatial resolution is 10
m 8 m, and the indence angle ranges from 38.37 at near
range to 39.85 at far range. Suzhou is suitable for carrying out
the change detection experiments due to its rapid urban
expansion in recent years, and we select a region of interest
792
(ROI) over Shihu areas for futher investigations, as given in
Figs. 1(a) and (b). The image size is 895 540. And Fig. 1(c)
illustrates the real change map of the study areas.
parameters to modulate the weight of wishart distance and the
gradient. To speed up the SLIC segmentation, the iteration is
terminated when the percentage of pixels switching between
classes is lower than a given threshold Pc, in our experiments,
Pc is 5.0%. S, m and N in our experiments are 15, 1 and 15,
respectively.
Fig. 2 shows the SLIC superpixel segmentation results,
which show ability to preserve the objects edge well. Figs. 2(c)
and (d) compare the results with and without using the edge
gradient, as labeled in the yellow ellipses, the improved
distance measurement performs better in edge preserving.

Fig.1. The Pauli images of the study site acquired on (a) April 9, 2009, and (b)
June 15, 2010; and (c) the real change map of the study areas.

III. PROPOSED CHANGE DETECTION METHOD

A. Pol-InSAR images segmentation

The SLIC superpixel segmentation is introduced for Pol-
InSAR images segmentation, the details of SLIC segmentation
for single PolSAR image have been illustrated in [8]. The main
steps including edge detection; initialization of the cluster
centers; local iterative clustering; and postprocessing. In this
paper, the interferometric coherency matrix T6 is used instead
of the T3, Equation (1) shows the definition of T6 Fig. 2. The SLIC superpixel segmentation results of master (a) and slave (b)

, k6 = [ k1 k2 ]
T images, the base maps are the Pauli images; (c) and (d) show the results with
T6 = k k *T
6 6 (1) and without using edge gradient.
where B. DM generation and evaluation
k = [ S HH + SVV S HH SVV 2 S HV ]
T
2 (2) DM calculated based on the complex wishart distribution
The <> denotes the spatial averaging operation, the model can be expressed as
superscripts * and T indicate the complex conjugate and the Tr(T3 (i) 1T3 ( j ) + T3 ( j )1 T3 (i ))
DW (T3 (i), T3 ( j )) = 3 (6)
matrix transpose, k1 and k2 are the scattering vectors of master 2
and slave images. Similarly, DM calculated using the tatal intensity Span is
In [8], the edge map is only used in the initialization of the
Spani Span j
cluster centers. To further preserve the edge in the DS (T3 (i), T3 ( j )) = + 2 (7)
segmentation result, we integrate the edge gradient into the Span j Spani
definition of distance measurement between a certain pixel p Except for these widely used DMs, in this paper, we
and the cluster center i explore the potentials of color-based features in PolSAR
2 2 images change detection. Without loss of generality, the
dp d dg
D = + s + 2 (3) following experiments are carried out based on the Pauli image,
m S N which is one of the most widely used tools to visualize the
where details of objects in PolSAR images. And the definition of
color-based DM is
T6 ( p )
d p = ln
T6 ( i ) ( )
+ Tr T6 ( p ) T6 ( i ) q, q = 6
1
(4) DC (( Rm , Gm , Bm ), ( Rs , Gs , Bs ))
(8)
= { Rm Rs + Gm Gs + Bm Bs } 3

(x x ) + ( y yp )
where (Rm, Gm, Bm) and (Rs, Gs, Bs) are the colors of master and
2 2
ds = i p j (5)
slave images.
where dp is the wishart distance between two coherency Fig. 3 shows the DMs based on different distance
matrices, ds is the euclidean distance, xi and yi indicate the row measurements. To evaluate the DMs, we use the receiver
and colume number, dg is the edge gradient obtained by the operating characteristic (ROC) curve, which has been widely
edge detector. S is the desired superpixel size, m and N are the used in the performance evaluation of DM extraction methods

2015 IEEE 5th Asia-Pacific Conference on Synthetic Aperture Radar(APSAR) 793

on SAR image change detection[5]. The ROC curve can avoid
the effects of threshold methods on the evaluation. Fig. 4
illustrates the ROC curves of different DMs. DMs generated
using the complex wishart distribution model and the color
information outperform that using the Span, and under the low
false alarm rate, the color-based DM performs the best, which
demonstrates the potentials of color information in PolSAR
images change detection.

Fig. 3. DMs generated based on (a) the complex wishart distribution model, (b)
the total intensity, and (c) the color information.
Fig. 5. The flowchart of the first change detection scheme.

Fig. 4. ROC curves for different DMs.

C. Two change detection schemes

After the Pol-InSAR images segmentation and DMs
generation, we propose two change detection schemes. The
main flowcharts are given in Fig. 5 and Fig. 6. In the first
change detection scheme, the threshold segmentation is
performed to the three DMs, and three binary maps can be
obtained. Afterwards, the superpixels and the binary maps are
introduced into the two-step majority voting. In the first step,
for the remaining superpixels corresponding to a certain binary
map, a certain superpxel is preserved if the percentage of pixels
labeled as changed is larger than 50%; in the second step, a
superpixel is considered changed areas if it is labeled as
changed areas at least two times in the three binary maps.
Fig. 6. The flowchart of the second change detection scheme.
Fig. 7 shows the threshold segmentation results using Otsu
method[10]. Figs. 7(a)~(c) are the results of the three DMs,
results using wishart-similarity and Span-based DMs have less
false alarms but miss some changed areas. On the contrary,
result with color-based DM perform well in detecting changed
areas; however, it has so many false alarms. The first step
voting is used to remove the small false alarms, as given in Fig.
8. The second step majority voting is designed to filter the big
false alarms and keep the real changed areas as much as

794 2015 IEEE 5th Asia-Pacific Conference on Synthetic Aperture Radar(APSAR)

possible. Fig. 9(a) illustrates the final result after the two steps
voting.

Fig. 7. The threshold segmention results of (a) the wishart-similarity DM, (b)
the Span-based DM, and (c) the color-based DM.

Fig. 9. The result using (a) the first change detection scheme and (b) the second
change detection scheme.

In the second change detection scheme, the threshold

Fig. 8. The results after first step majority voting of (a) the wishart-similarity
segmentation, (b) the Span-based segmentation, and (c) the color-based
segmentation.
segmentation is performed to the combined similarity map, and
the combined similarity map DF is generated as
DF = 1 DW + 2 DS + 3 DC , 1 + 2 + 3 = 1 (9)
i ( i = 1, 2,3 ) are the weight of each DM, and in our
experiments, i = 1 3 ( i = 1, 2,3) . The majority voting here is
the same as the first voting used in former scheme. The change
detection result using the combined map is given in Fig.9 (b).
Compared with Fig. 9(a), more changed areas can be detected.

TABLE I. RESULTS OF THE CHANGE DETECTION IN OUR EXPERIMENTS.

Each category accuracy(%) Overall Accuracy
Changed Unchanged False Missed Overall
Accuracy Kappa
Users Producers Users Producers alarms alarms alarms
(%) coefficient
accuracy accuracy accuracy accuracy
Wishart 59.36 93.04 99.73 97.59 97.42 0.7120 1,226 11,220 12,446
SPAN 52.04 93.43 99.78 97.17 97.05 0.6544 1,010 13,242 14,252
Color 92.30 46.04 93.45 99.50 93.38 0.5826 29,867 2,125 31,992
Method1 59.63 93.61 99.75 97.61 97.46 0.7159 1,126 11,146 12,269
Method2 89.20 88.30 99.28 99.35 98.71 0.8806 3,264 2,982 6,246

Tab. I gives the statistics results of the experimental results
in Fig. 8 and Fig. 9. The overall alarms of the three DMs are
large, and the result of the first method is very close to one of
the three DMs. The combined DM produce the best change
detection result, the overall alarms decrease significantly. The
experimental results suggest that the superpixels show great
potential in reducing the false alarms, and the fusion of
different DMs can improve PolSAR change detection accuracy.
IV. CONCLUSIONS
In this paper, we proposed a superpixel-based PolSAR
images change detection method, which involves Pol-InSAR
image segmentation, DM generation, and the fusion of the
DMs in two different schemes. The proposed method shows
potential in segmentating the PolSAR images simultaneously.
Moreover, the experimental results using the proposed scheme
perform better than that using only one DM. In our future work,
we will explore the ability of other color-based features in
change detection, like MPEG-7 color descriptors.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work was jointly supported by the National Natural
Science Foundation of China (Nos. 41371352 and 41331176),
and the open project (EMW201510) funded by Key Laboratory
for Information Science of Electromagnetic Waves.

2015 IEEE 5th Asia-Pacific Conference on Synthetic Aperture Radar(APSAR) 795

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