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A novel framework for change

detection in bi-temporal polarimetric
SAR images

Pirrone, Davide, Bovolo, Francesca, Bruzzone, Lorenzo

Davide Pirrone, Francesca Bovolo, Lorenzo Bruzzone, "A novel framework for
change detection in bi-temporal polarimetric SAR images," Proc. SPIE 10004,
Image and Signal Processing for Remote Sensing XXII, 100040Z (18 October
2016); doi: 10.1117/12.2241636

Event: SPIE Remote Sensing, 2016, Edinburgh, United Kingdom

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 A novel framework for change detection in bi-temporal polarimetric
SAR images
Pirrone Davidea,b, Bovolo Francescab, Bruzzone Lorenzoa
a
Dept. of Information Engineering and Computer Science, University of Trento
Via Sommarive, 14, I-38123, Trento, Italy
b
Center for Information and Communication Technology, Fondazione Bruno Kessler,
Via Sommarive, 18 I-38123, Povo, Trento, Italy

ABSTRACT

Last years have seen relevant increase of polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data availability, thanks to satellite
sensors like Sentinel-1 or ALOS-2 PALSAR-2. The augmented information lying in the additional polarimetric channels
represents a possibility for better discriminate different classes of changes in change detection (CD) applications. This
work aims at proposing a framework for CD in multi-temporal multi-polarization SAR data. The framework includes both
a tool for an effective visual representation of the change information and a method for extracting the multiple-change
information. Both components are designed to effectively handle the multi-dimensionality of polarimetric data. In the
novel representation, multi-temporal intensity SAR data are employed to compute a polarimetric log-ratio. The multi-
temporal information of the polarimetric log-ratio image is represented in a multi-dimensional features space, where
changes are highlighted in terms of magnitude and direction. This representation is employed to design a novel
unsupervised multi-class CD approach. This approach considers a sequential two-step analysis of the magnitude and the
direction information for separating non-changed and changed samples. The proposed approach has been validated on a
pair of Sentinel-1 data acquired before and after the flood in Tamil-Nadu in 2015. Preliminary results demonstrate that the
representation tool is effective and that the use of polarimetric SAR data is promising in multi-class change detection
applications.
Keywords: Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), Polarimetric SAR, Multi-temporal analysis, Change detection, automatic
approach, polarimetric change vector

1. INTRODUCTION
Spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) systems are microwave active systems which represent a very important tool
in Earth Observation. This is because their imaging capabilities have low dependence on the cloud coverage and
illumination. Thus, SAR images are widely exploited in multi-temporal analysis for change detection applications such as
damage assessment, crop monitoring, etc. Most of the SAR systems acquire data with a single polarization channel,
transmitting and receiving signals with the same polarization (e.g., VV for vertical transmit and vertical receive). Among
SAR systems, Polarimetric ones (PolSAR) are able to acquire data with different combinations for the transmitted and
received wave polarization, enhancing the information extraction capabilities. In the recent years, data volume from
PolSAR sensors has gradually increased, because of both the new constellations with polarimetric sensors for continuous
global monitoring (i.e., Sentinel-1 mission) and the increased performance in terms of polarimetric channels and/or spatial
resolution (i.e., ALOS-2 PALSAR-2 and the future Cosmo-SkyMed Second Generation sensors). With respect to earlier
single-polarization data, the multi-polarization ones have enhanced information lying on the multiple polarimetric
channels, in terms of both amplitude and relative phase.
In the framework of the multi-temporal analysis of remote sensing images, change detection (CD) has a great relevance
because of the several civilian applications involving it (i.e., damage assessment, glaciers monitoring, crops monitoring).
In the recent years, the application capabilities have risen with the rising amount of data coming from both passive sensors
(i.e., multi-spectral and hyper-spectral) and active ones (i.e., SARs), and their capabilities in terms of spatial resolution
and number of channels (i.e., spectral channels for passive sensors, polarimetric channels for active ones). For this reason,
the hype on efficient strategies for unsupervised CD analysis is still high. In the literature, some of the approaches for CD
consider a direct comparison of corresponding pixels in multi-temporal images (i.e., pixel-based approaches)1-4, 7-9, 11-13,
while others exploit the spatial correlation of homogeneous regions for mitigating the noise effects and improving global

Image and Signal Processing for Remote Sensing XXII, edited by Lorenzo Bruzzone,
Francesca Bovolo, Proc. of SPIE Vol. 10004, 100040Z · © 2016 SPIE
CCC code: 0277-786X/16/$18 · doi: 10.1117/12.2241636

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 performance (i.e., context-based approaches)1, 2, 5, 6, 10. In this work, we focus on pixel-based CD approaches. They usually
apply a multi-temporal comparison of multi-temporal images to generate a change index (CI) image. A detection step
applied to CI highlights the changed regions. Depending on kind of the data considered, the two steps can be differently
implemented. In optical data1-4, multi-temporal comparison is typically computed by differencing one spectral channel
only. Other approaches consider different features, such as the combination of more spectral channels (i.e., NDVI1) or the
vectorial representation of the change information (i.e., CVA3, 4). With respect to the optical data, statistics for the SAR
data and the noise are different and this has an impact also on the strategies for the comparison and information extraction6-
13
. SAR data are affected by speckle multiplicative noise, so comparison is typically done by means of log-ratio (or ratio)
operator7,8,10,12,13, as it mitigates the effect of speckle and it enhances the image contrast for low values. Other works in the
literature consider comparison operator as Information Theory-based operators (e.g,, Mutual Information9 or KL
divergence11). Most of these strategies are designed for a binary CD and applies to single polarization data.
In the recent years, some works for CD applications using PolSAR data have been presented, because of the increasing
interest to the features of polarimetric channels14-23. In these works, the analysis is focused on the use of likelihood ratio
tests14, 15, 22, 23, the fusion of change maps based on terms from the polarimetric matrices16, 18 or the analysis of features from
polarimetric decompositions18-20. The detection is based on the statistical model of the different classes based and on the
optimal thresholding selection. In the literature, some methodologies derive an explicit formulation of the thresholds from
fuzzy theory10 or from the global statistical distribution (i.e., Kittler Illingworth thresholding5, 11-13, while other approaches
provide an optimal estimation of the classes (i.e., Expectation Maximization) before threshold estimation1-4, 6, 7. The
threshold is mostly derived on the basis of the Bayesian Decision theory for minimum error.
Although some works consider multiple features for CD analysis, the multi-class CD problem has not been effectively
tackled in the Polarimetric SAR data. In this context, this paper aims at introducing a new CD framework for SAR data
based on transformation of the polarimetric multi-temporal images space into a novel P-dimensional feature space. In this
space, change is characterized with a P-tuple of features describing the change in terms of magnitude and direction. Based
on this representation, we derive an unsupervised CD approach for the detection of different kinds of changes in the scene.
This paper is organized as follows: in Sec. II, the representation of the multi-temporal SAR information in the feature
space is presented and loci associated to the change and no-change classes are defined. In Sec. III, a novel unsupervised
approach for CD in PolSAR data, based on the novel feature space, is described. In Sec. IV, dataset and experimental
results are presented. Finally, Sec. V gives conclusions and possible future developments.

2. NOVEL REPRESENTATION TOOL FOR CHANGE DETECTION IN POLSAR DATA

Let us consider two intensity images 𝑋1 , 𝑋2 acquired on the same scene from a PolSAR sensor at times t1, t2, respectively.
Let us assume the two images have the same acquisition geometry and underwent the same pre-processing (i.e., calibration,
geocoding and filtering), thus they are perfectly overlapped and the information variation is related to physical changes in
the scene. Each polarimetric image is formed by P polarimetric channels. Depending on the settings of the polarimetric
sensor, the P can be either 2 or 3, namely one cross-pol channel (VH or HV, seen as equal in terms of scattering values)
and either one or two co-polarimetric channels (VV or HH). In the most general case, for P = 3, the image 𝑋𝑖 is defined
as:
𝑋𝑖 = [𝑋𝑖,𝑉𝑉 , 𝑋𝑖,𝑉𝐻 , 𝑋𝑖,𝐻𝐻 ], i = 1,2 (1)
Given the bi-temporal images, our goal is to separate, among the set of possible classes 𝛺 = {𝛺𝑐 , 𝜔𝑛𝑐 }, where 𝜔𝑛𝑐 is the
no-change class 𝛺𝑐 is the macro-class of changes defined as 𝛺𝑐 = {𝜔𝑐1 , … , 𝜔𝑐𝐾 }. 𝜔𝑐𝑘 is associated to on among K possible
kind of changes, k = 1,..,K. The strategy described in this work is based on the following steps: i) a multi-temporal pixel-
based comparison of the polarimetric images (or the features extracted from them) to generate a polarimetric CI image; ii)
the representation of the polarimetric CI image in a multi-dimensional feature space; iii) the automatic unsupervised change
information extraction. A block scheme of the proposed strategy is depicted in Figure 1.

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 Spherical
rPolarimetric representation of Unsupervised
Comparison Polarimetric Change Change Detection
Vectors r

Figure 1 – Block scheme of the proposed approach

In the first step, a multi-temporal comparison of the two PolSAR images is computed by defining a multi-dimensional
polarimetric log-ratio image XLR.
𝑋𝐿𝑅 = [𝑋𝐿𝑅,𝑉𝑉 , 𝑋𝐿𝑅,𝑉𝐻 , 𝑋𝐿𝑅,𝐻𝐻 ] (2)
𝑋𝐿𝑅 has the same number of polarimetric channels as the input images. Each of them, namely 𝑋𝐿𝑅,𝑝𝑞 , is defined as the log-
ratio image of the corresponding polarimetric channels of the two multi-temporal polarimetric images (3).
𝑋2,𝑝𝑞
𝑋𝐿𝑅,𝑝𝑞 = log ( ) = log 𝑋2,𝑝𝑞 − log 𝑋1,𝑝𝑞 , 𝑝𝑞 ∈ [𝑉𝑉, 𝑉𝐻, 𝐻𝐻] (3)
𝑋1,𝑝𝑞
The use of the log-ratio mitigates the effect of the speckle noise on the multi-temporal comparison and reduces the
skewness for the different modes on the related histogram. Each sample on XLR can be represented as a Polarimetric Change
Vector (PCV) lying in a P-dimensional orthonormal feature space. This representation can be alternatively expressed in
Cartesian coordinates (i.e., the components 𝑋𝐿𝑅,𝑝𝑞 ) or in polar/spherical coordinates, by defining the magnitude 𝜌 and P-1
directions, namely 𝜗 and 𝜑, according to (4).

2 2 2
𝜌 = √𝑋𝐿𝑅,𝑉𝑉 + 𝑋𝐿𝑅,𝑉𝐻 + 𝑋𝐿𝑅,𝐻𝐻

𝑋𝐿𝑅,𝑉𝐻
𝜑 = tan−1 [ ] (4)
𝑋𝐿𝑅,𝑉𝑉
𝑋𝐿𝑅,𝐻𝐻
𝜃 = cos −1 [ ]
{ 𝜌
In the polar/spherical coordinate system, PCVs are bounded into a sphere S having radius 𝜌𝑚𝑎𝑥 , that corresponds to the
maximum magnitude of the PCVs for the considered image pair (Fig.2a).
𝑆 = {𝜌, 𝜗, 𝜑 : 0 ≤ 𝜌 ≤ 𝜌𝑚𝑎𝑥 , 0 ≤ 𝜗 ≤ 𝜋, 0 ≤ 𝜑 < 2𝜋} (5)
In S, PCVs related to unchanged pixels are expected to fall close to the origin, as the two multi-temporal images have
similar values on all the polarimetric channels and thus result in small 𝜌 values. These pixels tend to fall in an inner sphere
Cn centered in the origin (dark sphere in Fig.2b). The radius T of the sphere Cn is set based on minimum error decision rule
applied to the magnitude variable.
𝐶𝑛 = {𝜌, 𝜗, 𝜑 : 0 ≤ 𝜌 < 𝑇, 0 ≤ 𝜗 ≤ 𝜋, 0 ≤ 𝜑 < 2𝜋} (6)
On the other hand, PCVs associated to changed pixels are expected to be located in the spherical annulus Ac complementary
to Cn, defined as the region of S with magnitude greater than T (dark volume in Fig.3a).
𝐴𝑐 = {𝜌, 𝜗, 𝜑 : 𝜌 ≥ 𝑇, 0 ≤ 𝜗 ≤ 𝜋, 0 ≤ 𝜑 < 2𝜋} (7)
In Ac, the PCVs are clustered along preferred directions, based on the kind of change. Each of these directions can be

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 identified by volume 𝑆𝑘 (darker volume in Fig.3b), bounded by two thresholds on both the direction variables, namely
𝜑𝑘1 , 𝜑𝑘2 for 𝜑 and 𝜃𝑘1 , 𝜃𝑘2 for 𝜃. For the two pairs, intervals ∆𝜑𝑘 = |𝜑𝑘2 − 𝜑𝑘1 | and ∆𝜃𝑘 = |𝜃𝑘2 − 𝜃𝑘1 | can be defined.
In this framework, unambiguous changes can be individuated as different volumes 𝑆𝑘 and easily separated by thresholding
the direction features. Each 𝑆𝑘 corresponds to one change class 𝜔𝑐𝑘 ∈ 𝛺𝑐 , 𝑘 = 1, … 𝐾.

𝑆𝑘 = {𝜌, 𝜗, 𝜑 : 𝜌 ≥ 𝑇, 𝜗𝑘1 ≤ 𝜗 < 𝜗𝑘2 , 𝜑𝑘1 ≤ 𝜑 < 𝜑𝑘2 } (8)

(a) (b)
Figure 2 – PCVs spherical domain S (a) and the inner sphere Cn containing PCVs of unchanged pixels (b).

(a) (b)
Figure 3 – Spherical annulus Ac containing PCVs for all the changed pixels (a) and sector Sk containing PCVs referring to
the k-th change (b).

The angular threshold pairs (𝜑𝑘1 , 𝜑𝑘2 ) and (𝜃𝑘1 , 𝜃𝑘2 ) of the sector 𝑆𝑘 are set based on minimum error decision rule applied
on the statistical distribution of classes along the direction variables. In the following section, an unsupervised multi-class
CD approach based on this framework is presented.

3. UNSUPERVISED CHANGE DETECTION APPROACH

By considering the framework presented in the previous section, we propose a two-step unsupervised CD algorithm. The

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 first step is binary CD performed along the magnitude variable. It separates the two macro-classes 𝛺𝑐 and 𝜔𝑛𝑐 . In the
second step, the direction variables of the pixels belonging to 𝛺𝑐 are taken as input for a multi-class CD. Without loss of
generality, let us assume that dual-pol images are available (P=2). Thus the magnitude 𝜌 and a single direction variable 𝜑
can be computed. On both steps, classes separation is carried out by estimating the class conditional distributions and
applying a detection strategy. The block scheme of the unsupervised CD strategy is illustrated in Figure 4.

corso f1, densities]

Detection
estimation
J

Masking
L

Change -class
densities estimation [ Detection

Figure 4 - Block scheme of the unsupervised CD approach based on the Polarimetric CVA framework.

In the first step of the algorithm, we model a two-class problem along the magnitude variable that aims at separating 𝛺𝑐
and 𝜔𝑛𝑐 . While 𝜔𝑛𝑐 is the only class associated to the non-change, 𝛺𝑐 is the union of all the K change classes 𝜔𝑐𝑘 :
𝐾

𝛺𝑐 = ⋃ 𝜔𝑐𝑘 (9)
𝑘=1

Thus, the distribution of the magnitude variable can be modeled as a mixture of the two components.
𝑝(𝜌) = 𝑃(𝛺𝑐 )𝑝(𝜌|𝛺𝑐 ) + 𝑃(𝜔𝑛𝑐 )𝑝(𝜌|𝜔𝑛𝑐 ) (10)
where 𝑃(𝛺𝑐 ), 𝑃(𝜔𝑛𝑐 )are the the prior probabilities for the classes 𝛺𝑐 and 𝜔𝑛𝑐 respectively and 𝑝(𝜌|𝛺𝑐 ), 𝑝(𝜌|𝜔𝑛𝑐 ) are the
conditional distributions for the same classes. An appoximation of 𝑝(𝜌) is given by the histogram of the magnitude image.
In the literature, different statistical distributions have been proposed for building mixture models for SAR data. Rayeigh-
Rice distributions have been widely used for modelling SAR single-date amplitude, while multi-temporal log-ratio has
been studied through mixtures of Gaussians or Generalized Gaussians. The magnitude of the Polarimetric Change Vector
is not easily characterizable in terms of SAR statistics and an exhaustive study of this is out of the scope of the paper.
Therefore, we approximate the conditional probability density function (pdf) of the magnitude variable as a mixture of
Generalized Gaussians, with parameters αi, βi, μi, as in (11).
𝛽
|𝜌−𝜇𝑖 | 𝑖
𝛽𝑖 −[ ]
𝑝(𝜌|𝜔𝑖 ) = 1
𝑒 𝛼𝑖
; 𝜔𝑖 ∈ {𝜔𝑛𝑐 , 𝛺𝑐 } (11)
2𝛼𝑖 𝛤 ( )
𝛽𝑖

The choice of the Generalized Gaussian mixture represents a good tradeoff between the model complexity (i.e., the number
of parameters regulating the distribution) and the likelihood overall performance.
Let us define a parameters vector Θ𝜌 containing both the unknown distribution parameters and the prior probabilities for
both 𝛺𝑐 and 𝜔𝑛𝑐 :

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 Θ𝜌 = {𝑃(𝛺𝑐 ), 𝑃(𝜔𝑛𝑐 ), 𝛼𝐶 , 𝛼𝑛𝑐 , 𝛽𝐶 , 𝛽𝑛𝑐 , 𝜇𝐶 , 𝜇𝑛𝑐 } (12)
Different methodologies are available in the literature for the estimation of the mixture components. In this work, we use
Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm. The EM algorithm consists in the multiple iteration of two stages until
convergence: i) the evaluation of the log-likelihood of the set of parameters in the mixture of distribution given the
outcomes in the magnitude image; and ii) the derivation of the values for prior probabilities and conditional pdf that
maximize the likelihood. For the distribution described in (10), the log-likelihood is given by (13).

𝐿(Θ𝜌 | 𝜌) = ∑ log[𝑃𝑐 (𝛺𝑐 )𝑝(𝜌𝑧 |𝛺𝑐 ) + 𝑃𝑐 (𝜔𝑛𝑐 )𝑝(𝜌𝑧 |𝜔𝑛𝑐 )] (13)

𝜌𝑧 ∈ 𝜌

where 𝜌𝑧 is an element of 𝜌 . We can substitute the Generalized Gaussian model into (13). At the general (t+1)-th iteration,
the EM algorithm provide an estimation of the parameter vector Θ𝜌 of the single Generalized Gaussian in terms of the
same parameters estimated at the t-th iteration, according to (14). The estimation is obtained by maximizing 𝐿(Θ𝜌 |𝜌)
computed with the parameter vector at the t-th iteration.
(𝑡+1) ∑𝜌𝑧 ∈ 𝜌 𝑝(𝑡) (𝜔𝑖 |𝜌𝑧 )
𝑃 (𝜔𝑖 ) =
𝑀𝑁
1
(𝑡) (𝑡)
(𝑡) (𝑡) 𝛽𝑖 𝛽
𝑖
(𝑡+1) ∑𝜌𝑧 ∈ 𝜌 𝑝 (𝜔𝑖 |𝜌𝑧 )|𝜌𝑧 −𝜇𝑖 |
𝛼𝑖 =[ (𝑡)
]
∑𝑧𝜌𝑧 ∈ 𝜌 𝑝 (𝜔𝑖 |𝜌𝑧 )

(𝑡) (𝑡) ; 𝜔𝑖 ∈ {𝜔𝑛𝑐 , 𝛺𝑐 }. (14)

𝛽𝑖 (𝑡+1) 𝛽𝑖 −1 (𝑡+1)
∑𝜌𝑧 ∈ 𝜌 𝑝(𝑡) (𝜔𝑖 |𝜌𝑧 ) [ (𝑡) |𝜌𝑧 − 𝜇𝑖 | 𝑠𝑖𝑔𝑛(𝜌𝑧 − 𝜇𝑖 )] = 0
(𝑡)𝛽𝑖
𝛼𝑖
1 (𝑡+1)
Γ′( (𝑡+1) ) (𝑡) 𝛽𝑖 (𝑡)
1 𝛽 |𝜌𝑧 −𝜇𝑖 | |𝜌𝑧 −𝜇𝑖 |
(𝑡)
∑𝜌𝑧 ∈ 𝜌 𝑝 (𝜔𝑖 |𝜌𝑧 ) [ 𝑖
(𝑡+1) + 1 (𝑡+1) 2 −( (𝑡) ) log (𝑡) ]=0
𝛽𝑖 Γ( (𝑡+1) )(𝛽𝑖 ) 𝛼𝑖 𝛼𝑖
{ 𝛽
𝑖

The estimated parameters are employed in the detection step. Under the assumption of inter-pixel independence, we
consider Bayesian Minimum Error decision rule for assigning each pixel to the class that maximizes the posterior
probability:
𝜌 ∈ 𝜔𝑖 ⇔ 𝑃(𝜔𝑖 )𝑝(𝜌|𝜔𝑖 ) > 𝑃(𝜔𝑗 )𝑝(𝜌|𝜔𝑗 ); 𝑗 ≠ 𝑖; 𝜔𝑖 , 𝜔𝑗 ∈ {𝜔𝑛𝑐 , 𝛺𝑐 } (15)
The magnitude threshold T is the value of 𝜌 that makes the posterior probabilities for the two classes equal. Dashed circle
in Fig.5 represents the decision threshold along the magnitude separating the class (𝜔𝑛𝑐 ) (checked cluster) from the macro-
class 𝛺𝑐 (striped clusters).

'MGM

Figure 5 – Step 1: binary CD along the magnitude feature.

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 In order to separate the different changes 𝜔𝑐𝑘 in 𝛺𝑐 , we proceed with the second step of the algorithm: a multi-class CD
along the direction variable. Let us consider the set of the pixels classified as 𝛺𝑐 in Step 1. The pdf 𝑝(𝜑|𝛺𝑐 ), approximated
by the histogram along 𝜑 of the changed pixels detected in Step 1, is evaluated. The pdf is modeled as a mixture of K
contributions, with prior probabilities 𝑃(𝜔𝑐𝑘 ).
𝐾

𝑝(𝜑|𝛺𝑐 ) = ∑ 𝑃(𝜔𝑐𝑘 )𝑝(𝜑|𝜔𝑐𝑘 ) (16)

𝑘=1

An accurate statistical model for this variable is complex and out of the goal of this work. Therefore, we consider the
conditional distribution for each 𝜔𝑐𝑘 being a Gaussian with parameters 𝑚𝑘 , 𝜎𝑘 .
2
(𝜑−𝑚𝑘 )
1 − 2
2𝜎𝑘
𝑝(𝜑|𝜔𝑐𝑘 ) = 𝑒 (17)
√2𝜋𝜎𝑘2
Similarly to what described for the magnitude, the EM algorithm is used for the estimation of the single contributions of
the mixture. In order to do that, a new parameter vector Θ𝜑 is defined as (18).
Θ𝜑 = {𝑃(𝜔𝑐1 ), ⋯ , 𝑃(𝜔𝑐𝑘 ), 𝜇𝑐1 , ⋯ , 𝜇𝑐𝑘 , 𝜎𝑐1 , ⋯ , 𝜎𝑐𝑘 } (18)
The log-likelihood function for the direction distribution is computed and maximized with respect to the vector Θ𝜑 , until
convergence. This provides the estimation of the parameters at the (t+1)-th iteration, as described in (10).
}
∑𝑐𝑎𝑟𝑑{𝛺
𝑧=1
𝑐
𝑝(𝑡) (𝜔𝑐𝑘 |𝜑𝑧 )
𝑃 (𝑡+1) (𝜔𝑐𝑘 ) =
𝑐𝑎𝑟𝑑{𝛺𝑐 }
}
(𝑡∗1) ∑𝑐𝑎𝑟𝑑{𝛺
𝑧=1
𝑐
𝑝 (𝑡) (𝜔𝑐𝑘 |𝜑𝑧 )𝜑𝑧
𝑚𝑐𝑘 = } ; ∀ 𝜑𝑧 |𝜌𝑧 > 𝑇 (19)
∑𝑐𝑎𝑟𝑑{𝛺
𝑧=1
𝑐
𝑝(𝑡) (𝜔𝑐𝑘 |𝜑𝑧 )
} (𝑡)
2 )(𝑡+1)
∑𝑐𝑎𝑟𝑑{𝛺
𝑧=1
𝑐
𝑝(𝑡) (𝜔𝑐𝑘 |𝜑𝑧 )(𝜑𝑧 − 𝑚𝑐𝑘 )2
(𝜎𝑐𝑘 = }
{ ∑𝑐𝑎𝑟𝑑{𝛺
𝑧=1
𝑐
𝑝(𝑡) (𝜔𝑐𝑘 |𝜑𝑧 )
Once the Gaussian distributions for the change classes are available, the Bayesian Minimum Error decision rule is
employed for assigning the pixel class, as it follows:
𝜑 ∈ 𝜔𝑐𝑘 ⇔ 𝑃(𝜔𝑐𝑘 )𝑝(𝜑|𝜔𝑐𝑘 ) > 𝑃(𝜔𝑐𝑗 )𝑝(𝜑|𝜔𝑐𝑗 ); ∀ 𝑗 ≠ 𝑘; 𝜔𝑐𝑗 , 𝜔𝑐𝑘 ∈ 𝛺𝑐 (20)
The angular thresholds can be derived from the decision rule by making the posterior probabilities equal for pairs of
adjacent classes, as described in (21). This provides the values for K thresholds.
𝑝(𝜔𝑐𝑗 )𝑃(𝜑|𝜔𝑐𝑗 ) = 𝑝(𝜑|𝜔𝑐𝑘 )𝑃(𝜔𝑐𝑘 ); 𝜔𝑐𝑗 , 𝜔𝑐𝑘 ∈ 𝛺𝑐 (21)
At the end of the Step 2, the different classes of change are separated and the multiple change detection problem solved,
as illustrated in Fig.6.

Figure 6 – Step 2: Multi-class CD along the direction feature.

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 4. DATASET DESCRIPTION AND EMPIRICAL RESULTS
For a preliminary validation of the proposed CD strategy, we considered the case of the Chennai region (India), indicated
in Fig.7a. In November 2015, the region was affected by a flood. We considered as input dataset the pair of intensity SAR
images acquired by Sentinel-1 satellite mission over that region in October and November 2015 respectively. The two
images are Level-1 products Ground-Range Detected (GRD), with spatial resolution of 20m and two polarimetric channels
(i.e., VV and VH). As reference data, we considered ground truth coming from the United Nations Institute for Training
and Research (www.unitar.org), representing the change map of the water bodies after the flood, as in Fig.7b.

(a) (b)

(c) (d)

zo -

15
Dry out \
area
10 /.. ...
-0
o
-

ange

Flooded
-15

-20
-25
.
-15 -10
..
-5
area
0 5
W-channel Log-ratio (dB)
10 15 20

(e)
Figure 7 – Optical image of the test area (source: Google Earth©) (a); ground truth map (b); multi-temporal false color
composition for VV (c) and VH (d) channels. R: Oct. 2015, G: Nov. 2015; B: Oct. 2015; scatter-plot of the polarimetric
log-ratio components XLR,VV, XLR,VH (e).

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 In the map, change in the water bodies created both level increase (flooded areas) and decrease (dried areas). From a
numerical point of view, considering a crop of size 300x427 pixels, a total number of 15235 changed pixels was detected.
As preliminary step, the two SAR images have been pre-processed with radiometric calibration and geo-coding. A further
Gamma filtering on the image has applied on the image for the mitigation of the speckle noise. The size of window of the
Gamma filter was set to as 3x3. Fig.7c-d show the two multi-temporal false-color compositions in the VV and VH
polarimetric channels, respectively. After preprocessing, the input polarimetric images were compared by using the
polarimetric log-ratio 𝑋𝐿𝑅 = [𝑋𝐿𝑅,𝑉𝑉 , 𝑋𝐿𝑅,𝑉𝐻 ], as defined as in (3) and (4).
XLR information was first plot according to the proposed representation. The plot in Fig.7e globally shows three main
classes: unchanged, flooded and dried areas, corresponding to Cn S1 and S2 respectively, as described in Sec.2. A joint
analysis of the two channels of the polarimetric log-ratio was manually conducted, for the detection of PCVs related to the
changed areas. Unchanged areas (dashed red circle in Fig.7e) show neglectable change on both 𝑋𝐿𝑅,𝑉𝑉 and 𝑋𝐿𝑅,𝑉𝐻 , so they
are grouped around the origin. Dried areas (dark grey sector in Fig.7e) are associated to an increase of backscattering for
both the channels VV and VH, so we have sensibly positive values for 𝑋𝐿𝑅,𝑉𝑉 and 𝑋𝐿𝑅,𝑉𝐻 . This can be explained with the
diminution of the specular reflection caused by the water surface, which increases the backscattering. Conversely, flooded
areas (light grey sector in Fig.7e) are associated to a decrease of backscattering for both the channels VV and VH and
negative values on both the components of 𝑋𝐿𝑅 .

0.25
T=10,02

0.2

0.15
4
4 0.1

0.05

-10 0 10 20 30p
(a)

(b) (c)
Figure 8 – Histogram of the magnitude variable and decision threshold T (a); binary CD Map (b); reference map (d)

In order to apply the proposed unsupervised CD strategy, magnitude and direction features have been derived from the
polarimetric log-ratio. In the first step, binary CD analysis was conducted on the magnitude feature. In our preliminary
experiment, magnitude threshold was tuned with optimal manual trial-and-error procedure. In this way, we limit the impact
of errors in Step 1 on the performance of the multiple change detection conducted in Step 2. The manual trial-and-error
threshold value was set to 10.02. set the value to T = 10.0 in order to proceed with the multi-class analysis of 𝛺𝑐 . Fig.8c
and Fig.8d show the related binary CD map and the reference map respectively. As we can see, the two maps look very

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 similar and an Overall Accuracy value of 90.47% was measured for the binary classification. The confusion matrix is given
in Table 1.

Table 1 – Confusion matrix for the binary CD analysis on the magnitude.

𝜔̂
𝑛𝑐
̂𝑐
𝛺
𝜔𝑛𝑐 109656 3209
𝛺𝑐 8997 6238

In the second step, multi-class CD was conducted in 𝛺𝑐 . The unchanged pixels were filtered out of the analysis. In the
multi-class CD, two change classes were considered, corresponding to the changes described above. The direction of the
selected pixels was thus modeled as a mixture model of K = 2 contributions, each of them modeled as Gaussian distributed.
The parameters of the mixture were estimated with EM algorithm. A summary of the parameters for the two mixture
components is reported in Table 2.

Table 2 –Gaussian mixture parameters estimated with EM algorithm.

P μ σ2
𝜔𝑐1 0.7809 -149.3553 308.1824
𝜔𝑐2 0.2191 35.4502 137.4606

By applying the Bayesian decision rule for minimum error on the estimated distributions, the direction threshold based on
the Bayesian approach is set to 𝜑1 = -34.79°. It is worth noting that the direction variable is periodic on intervals
[2(𝑘 − 1)𝜋; 2𝑘𝜋], 𝑘 ∈ 𝑍, while the analysis considered the wrapped interval [0; 2𝜋]. The second threshold can be derived
from practical considerations, given by the periodicity of the direction variable. For a two-class problem, the second
angular threshold is the opposite direction with the first one, therefore 𝜑2 = -214.79°. Fig.9b shows the final multi-class
CD map. From a visual comparison with the reference map in Fig.7b, we clearly see that most of the changes are correctly
identified and separated.

(a) (b)
Figure 9 – Direction distribution its Gaussian mixture model (a); multi-class CD map (b).

From the numerical point of view, we have an Overall Accuracy of 90.43%. The confusion matrix, given in Table 3, shows
that very few pixels are misclassified between the two classes of changes. This confirms that the direction variable allows
to effectively separating among different kinds of change.

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 Table 3 – Confusion matrix for the multi-class CD analysis on the direction.

𝜔̂
𝑐2 𝜔̂
𝑛𝑐 𝜔̂
𝑐1

𝜔𝑐2 1815 1680 48

𝜔𝑛𝑐 265 109631 2969
𝜔𝑐1 0 7294 4398

5. CONCLUSIONS
In this work, we proposed a novel framework for the visual representation of the change information from polarimetric
SAR images acquired at two different times. The framework is based on the definition of the polarimetric log-ratio. A
Polarimetric Change Vector has been introduced as a representation of the polarimetric log-ratio in a novel feature space.
Different loci associated to both no-change and multiple change classes have been described and an efficient representation
in polar/spherical coordinates introduced. Magnitude and direction features were derived in the log-ratio image domain.
Based on them, a novel automatic multi-class CD strategy has been presented, based on two steps. The first step is a binary
CD operating along the magnitude variable which detect the non-change class and a change macro-class. In the second
step, the macro-class is analyzed along the direction in order to discriminate multiple kinds of change. A preliminary
validation analysis of the CD strategy points out the effectiveness of both the proposed representation and the CD strategy.
As future developments, we aim at: i) associating a physical meaning to the backscattering variations on the different
polarimetric channels; performing a rigorous analysis of the statistical distribution model for the Polarimetric Change
Vectors; iii) exploiting additional polarimetric features for better discrimination of the change classes.

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