COHERENCE CHANGE ANALYSIS FOR MULTIPASS INSAR IMAGES BASED ON THE

CHANGE DETECTION MATRIX

Thu Trang L Ê
Jean-Luc F ROGER, Alexis H RYSIEWICZ,
Laboratoire Magmas et Volcans Raphael PARIS
Université Clermont Auvergne,
CNRS, IRD, OPGC Laboratoire Magmas et Volcans
F-63000 Clermont-Ferrand, France; Université Clermont Auvergne,
CNRS, IRD, OPGC
Hanoi University of Mining and Geology F-63000 Clermont-Ferrand, France
18 Vien Street, 11910 Hanoi, Vietnam

ABSTRACT
This paper presents an approach for Interferometric Syn-
thetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) coherence change analysis.
This approach is based on the Change Detection Matrix
(CDM) which allows the identification of the presence of
changes on the ground. Coherence images are first com-
puted from InSAR image time series (ITS) between each
two adjacent dates. The CDM approach is then applied to
study the obtained coherence time series with patch-wise
analysis. The preliminary results on damage mapping re-
lated to the tsunami induced by the eruption of Krakatoa
volcano, Sunda Strait, Indonesia on December 22, 2018 us-
ing Sentinel-1 InSAR ITS have shown the relevancy of the
proposed approach.
Index terms— Coherence Change Analysis, Multipass
InSAR images, Change Detection Matrix, Tsunami, Vol-
canic eruption.
1. INTRODUCTION
Since the beginning of the 90’s, Synthetic Aperture Radar
(SAR) imagery has been proved to be useful for the moni-
toring of environmental changes due to natural or anthropic
processes. Both the amplitude and the phase of SAR im-
ages can be exploited depending on the nature of the studied
processes. Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (In-
SAR), for instance, estimates ground surface displacement
from the difference in phase (i.e. an interferogram) between
two SAR acquisitions [1]. Interferometric coherence, a by-
product of InSAR processing, provides an estimation of the
reliability of differential phase measurement [1]. It can be
used by itself to map the phase temporal stability (or lack
of temporal stability) between two SAR acquisitions. Al-
thought the detection of low InSAR coherence area has been
exploited in the last years for mapping of recently emplaced
lava flow [2], [3], the use of InSAR coherence for environ-
mental change detection remains poorly exploited. In this
paper, we present an approach based on the Change Detec-
tion Matrix (CDM) [4] applied to a coherence image time
series (ITS), produced from 11 Sentinel-1 interferograms,
for fast detection of areas affected by the tsunami induced
by the eruption of Krakatoa volcano, Sunda Strait, Indone-
sia on December 22, 2018.
2. METHODOLOGY
2.1. Coherence images
The proposed workflow is described in figure 1 for the fast
change analysis of InSAR coherence ITS. Indeed, from ac-
quired multipass InSAR images, several preprocessing steps
are required, i. e., image coregistration, orbit correction,
topographic phase compensation, and phase calibration to
build an InSAR image stack.
Coherence between each two adjacent images are then
calculated as follows:
hI1 I2∗ i
γ=p , (1)
h|I1 |2 ih|I2 |2 i
where I1 , I2 are complex images used for the calculation
of the interferometric phase. In practice, the coherence is
computed by a spatial averaging on L samples as:
PL ∗
n=1 I1,n I2,n
γ̂ = qP qP ;L ≥ 2 (2)
L ∗ L ∗
n=1 I1,n I1,n n=1 I2,n I2,n
This coherence is the mesurement of the correlation be-
tween data used to calculate interferometric phase [5]. It
has the value in [0, 1], the higher values indicate the better
quality of the calculated interferometric phase.

978-1-5386-9154-0/19/$31.00 ©2019 IEEE 1518 IGARSS 2019


Figure 1: Coherence change analysis workflow.
2.2. CDM for coherence change analysis
In low coherence areas, e. g., images over water body or
vegetation zones, it is not easy to interpret the coherence
images. In this approach, a series of coherence images com-
puted between each two adjacent dates of an InSAR ITS
is analyzed using CDM method with patch-wise process-
ing [6].
At this stage, each image of the coherence ITS is divided
into patches, therefore, the whole ITS is also devided into
patch stacks. Indeed, we consider an N -length coherence
ITS C = {Ct }16t6N , where Ct denotes the coherence image
computed from the tth image pair of the initial InSAR ITS
(sorted by acquisition date). Each image Ct with size m × n
is divided into patches:
{Pt (i, j)}16i6 m ={Ct }([(i − 1)u + 1; (i − 1)u + u],
u
16j6 n
v The map of change dynamics presents all kinds of
[(j − 1)v + 1; (j − 1)v + v]),
(3)
with u × v size of each patch, u | m and v | n . Each patch
stack of the ITS is denoted by {Pt (i, j)}16t6N .
2.2.1. P-CDM
P-CDMs are constructed by two following steps:
• P-CDM 1: for each patch stack (i, j), a similarity ma-
trix is generated by caculating similarity cross-tests between
patches of each two different dates (t; k).
S(t,k) (i, j) = D (Pt (i, j), Pk (i, j))16t,k6N (4)
with D the similarity measure. A thresholding method is
then applied to this similarity matrix to obtain the first step
patch-based change detection matrix (P-CDM1) M . This is
a symmetric matrix containing 0 and 1 values representing
1519
unchanged and changed patches in each patch stack, respec-
tively.  
0
M(t,k) (i, j) = S(t,k) (i, j) ≶ T (5)
1
• P-CDM 2: All unchanged patches identified from P-
CDM1 are aggregated to build temporal neighborhoods cor-
responding to each date t as:

Ψ (Pt (i, j)) = Pk (i, j) | M(t,k) (i, j) = 0 16k6N . (6)
Similarity cross-test and a threshold value are then applied
to these temporal neighborhoods to derive the second step
patch-based change detection matrix (P-CDM2) M̂ contain-
ing more accurate change detection results.
Ŝ(t,k) (i, j) = D(Ψ(Pt (i, j)) , Ψ(Pk (i, j)))16t,k6N . (7)
 
0
M̂(t,k) (i, j) = Ŝ(t,k) (i, j) ≶ T . (8)
1
2.2.2. Analysis of Change Dynamics
The change dynamics of the study area can be analyzed
by an index obtained for each patch stack. This index of
change dynamics δ is calculated by the proportion of “1”
representing the probability of “changed” responses of sim-
ilarity tests in P-CDM2.
2 XN N
X
δ(i, j) = M̂(t,k) (i, j). (9)
N (N − 1) t=1
k=t+1
This index has values in [0, 1] presenting level of change dy-
namics from absolutely stable (δ = 0) to extremely unstable
(δ = 1).
changes occurred over the whole ITS, i. e., regular changes
(with index δ of high values), as well as changes associated
with a specific event. P-CDMs show the behavior of these
changes, and indentify the times when they occur. After the
analysis of changes, one can combine the change informa-
tion to generate the final change detection results.
3. APPLICATION TO THE DETECTION OF
AREAS AFFECTED BY TSUNAMI
3.1. Description of Study Area and Data Used
The proposed processing chain is applied to the coherence
change analysis of a time series produced from 12 single
look complex desending Sentinel-1 images in order to de-
tect the damaged areas at West coast of Java, Indonesia re-
lated to the tsunami induced by the eruption of Krakatoa
volcano on December 22, 2018 (figure 2). The images were
acquired from September 05, 2018 to January 03, 2019 (10

Figure 2: Location of the study area.
images before the event and 2 images after the event). Ta-
ble 1 shows the principal parameters of the dataset. We also
collected tide gauge data observed on SAR image acquisi-
tion dates at the Djakarta (Tanjung Priok) station.
3.2. Similarity measure and threshold selection
In this paper, we adopt the Kullback Leibler distance (KLD)
between two Log-normal distributions as the similarity mea-
sure (D in Eq. (4), (7)). It can be computed [7] as:
1
 
2 1 1
KLDLogn (X, Y ) = (µX − µY ) 2 + σ2
2 σX Y
 2 (10)
2

1 σY σX
+
2 σX 2 + σ 2 −1
Y tsunami hit, the P-CDMs always appear the change between
where α and β are the log-scale and shape parameters, re-
spectively, of probability distributions of random variables
X and Y .
To separate changes area from unchanged area, the min-
imum error thresholding method [8] is applied to select the
threshold in P-CDM construction step (Eq. (5), (8)).
3.3. Results and discussions
In this paper, from 12 single look complex Sentinel-1 im-
ages, 11 interferograms were calculated by the Sentinel Ap-
plication Platform (SNAP). Then each coherence image was
divided into 315 × 195 patches before the calculation of P-
CDMs. The obtained map of change dynamics (figure 3 (b))
shows the levels of changes occurred at the study area. We
1520
Table 1: Sentinel-1 dataset description.
Specifications Sentinel-1 dataset
Satellite Sentinel-1A
Launched date April 03, 2014
Satellite orbit Descending
Repeat cycle 12 days
Imaging frequency C-band at 5.4 GHz
Imaging mode IW
Data product SLC Level-1
Resolution 3.5 m×22 m (range×azimuth)
Polarization VV
Used swath IW3
Number of images 12 images
Acquisition dates 18/09/05; 18/09/17; 18/09/29;
(YY/MM/DD) 18/10/11; 18/10/23; 18/11/04;
18/11/16; 18/11/28; 17/12/28;
18/12/10; 18/12/22; 19/01/03
can observe that it is difficult to identify changes on the low
coherence image as in figure 3 (a), but on the map of change
dynamics, all types of changes occurred in the coherence
ITS are shown, including changes due to the tsunami and
volcanic eruption. By analyzing the P-CDMs (figure 4), we
can reveal the behavior of changes, then we obtain the final
result by combining different coherence images. Figure 5
show the similarity degree after taking the Log-normal KLD
between coherence images 8 and 9 (related to dates before
and after the tsunami). The P-CDM at the volcano (figure 4
(a)) reveals that the 2 last coherence images are those after
the eruption. On the map of change dynamics (figure 3 (b)),
regions 2 and 3 (cultivated areas) appear with δ of high val-
ues, but disappear on the final result (figure 5). This can be
explained by the black blocks on the P-CDMs (figure 4 (b),
(c)) that indicate no change at these regions on the dates
before, and after the tsunami. Along the coast where the
coherence images 8 and 9 (figure 4 (d)).
The collected tide gauge data show that the differences
of water levels measured on the 3 dates: December 10, 2018
(before the tsunami), December 22, 2018 (8 heures after the
tsunami) and January 03, 2019 (after the tsunami) are not
large (+ 11 cm and + 12 cm), therefore the detected changes
along the coast are not affected by the tide and could be
related to the disaster.
4. CONCLUSIONS
In this paper, an approach for the change analysis of coher-
ence images derived from an InSAR ITS is presented. The
preliminary results have shown the potential of patch-based
CDM for rapid analysis and detection of changes on low
 2018. To determine damaged areas in detail, high resolu-
tion SAR images should be used with the pixel-based CDM
approach.

5. ACKNOWLEDGMENT

This research was financed by the French government IDEX-

ISITE initiative 16-IDEX-0001 (CAP 20-25).

6. REFERENCES

[1] D. Massonnet and K. L. Feigl, “Radar interferometry

(a) (b) and its applications to changes in the Earth’s surface,”
Rev. Geophys., vol. 36, no. 4, pp. 441–500, 1998.
Figure 3: Coherence image (a), and map of change dynam-
ics (b) ). [2] M. G. Bato, J. L. Froger, A. J. L. Harris, and N. Vil-
leneuve, “Monitoring an effusive eruption at Piton de
la Fournaise using radar and thermal infrared remote
sensing data: insights into the October 2010 eruption
and its lava flows,” in Harris, A. J. L., De Groeve, T.,
Garel, F. & Carn, S. A. (eds) Detecting, Modelling and
Responding to Effusive Eruptions. Geological Society,
London, Special Publications,, vol. 426, pp. 533–552,
(a) (b) (c) (d) 2016.
Figure 4: P-CDMs of selected regions. (a) - Region 1: [3] A. Hrysiewicz, J. L. Froger, T. Menand, N. Villeneuve,
Krakatao volcano; (b) and (c) - Region 2 and 3: cultivated and A. Peltier, “InSAR characterization of ground sur-
areas (c); (d): On the coast. face displacements related to lava flows at Piton de la
Fournaise (La Reunion island, Indian ocean),” in AGU
Fall Meeting, 2018.
[4] T. T. Le, A. M. Atto, E. Trouve, A. Solikhin, and
V. Pinel, “Change detection matrix for multitemporal
filtering and change analysis of SAR and PolSAR im-
age time series,” ISPRS J. Photogramm. Remote Sens.,
vol. 107, pp. 64–76, 2015.
[5] T. Tupin, J. Inglada, and J.-M. Nicolas, Eds., Remote
sensing imagery, Wiley, 2014.
[6] T. T. Le, V. A. Tran, H. T. Pham, and X. T. Tran,
“Change detection in multitemporal sar images using a
strategy of multistage analysis,” In: Tien Bui D., Ngoc
Do A., Bui HB., Hoang ND. (eds) Advances and Appli-
cations in Geospatial Technology and Earth Resources.
GTER 2017. Springer, Cham, pp. 152–165, 2018.
[7] A. M. Atto, E. Trouve, Y. Berthoumieu, and G. Mercier,
Figure 5: Suspected changed areas affected by the tsunami “Multidate divergence matrices for the analysis of SAR
induced by the eruption of Krakatoa volcano, Sunda Strait, image time series,” IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote Sens.,
Indonesia on December 22, 2018. vol. 51, no. 4, pp. 1922–1938, 2013.
[8] J. Kittler and J. Illingworth, “Minimum error thresh-
olding,” Patten Recognition, vol. 19, No. 1, pp. 41–47,
coherence ITS. It successfully defined the areas affected by 1986.
the tsunami at the Sunda Strait, Indonesia on December 22,

1521