To improve the suppression effect for the speckle noise of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images and the ability of spatiotemporal information preservation of the filtered image without losing the spatial resolution, a novel multitemporal filtering method based on hypothesis testing is proposed in this paper. A framework of a two-step similarity measure strategy is adopted to further enhance the filtering results. Firstly, bi-date analysis using a two-sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) test is conducted in step 1 to extract homogeneous patches for 3-D patch stacks generation. Subsequently, the similarity between patch stacks is compared by a sliding time-series likelihood ratio (STSLR) test algorithm in step 2, which utilizes the multi-dimensional data structure of the stacks to improve the accuracy of unchanged pixels detection. Finally, the filtered values are obtained by averaging the similar pixels in time-series. The experimental results and analysis of two multitemporal datasets acquired by TerraSAR-X show that the proposed method outperforms the other typical methods with regard to the overall filtering effect, especially in terms of the consistency between the filtered images and the original ones. Furthermore, the performance of the proposed method is also discussed by analyzing the results from step 1 and step 2.

The existing unsupervised multitemporal change detection approaches for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images based on the pixel level usually suffer from the serious influence of speckle noise, and the classification accuracy of temporal change patterns is liable to be affected by the generation method of similarity matrices and the pre-specified cluster number. To address these issues, a novel time-series change detection method with high efficiency is proposed in this paper. Firstly, spatial feature extraction using local statistical information on patches is conducted to reduce the noise and for subsequent temporal grouping. Secondly, a density-based clustering method is adopted to categorize the pixel series in the temporal dimension, in view of its efficiency and robustness. Change detection and classification results are then obtained by a fast differential strategy in the final step. The experimental results and analysis of synthetic and realistic time-series SAR images acquired by TerraSAR-X in urban areas demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, which outperforms other approaches in terms of both qualitative results and quantitative indices of macro F1-scores and micro F1-scores. Furthermore, we make the case that more temporal change information for buildings can be obtained, which includes when the first and last detected change occurred and the frequency of changes.

Building change detection using remote sensing images is essential for various applications such as urban management and marketing planning. However, most change detection approaches can only detect the intensity or type of change. The aim of this study is to dig for more change information from time-series synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images, such as the change frequency and the change moments. This paper proposes a novel multitemporal building change detection framework that can generate change frequency map (CFM) and change moment maps (CMMs) from multitemporal SAR images. We first give definitions of CFM and CMMs. Then we generate change feature using four proposed generators. After that, a new cosegmentation method combining raw images and change feature is proposed to divide time-series images into changed and unchanged areas separately. Secondly, the proposed cosegmentation and the morphological building index (MBI) are combined to extract changed building objects. Then, the logical conjunction between the cosegmentation results and the binarized MBI is performed to recognize every moment of change. In the post-processing step, we use fragment removal to increase accuracy. Finally, we propose a novel accuracy assessment index for CFM. We call this index average change difference (ACD). Compared to the traditional multitemporal change detection methods, our method outperforms other approaches in terms of both qualitative results and quantitative indices of ACD using two TerraSAR-X datasets. The experiments show that the proposed method is effective in generating CFM and CMMs.