Image Change Detection via Ensemble Learning.

摘要

The concept of geographic change detection is relevant in many areas. Changes in geography can reveal much information about a particular location. For example, analysis of changes in geography can identify regions of population growth, change in land use, and potential environmental disturbance. A common way to perform change detection is to use a simple method such as differencing to detect regions of change. Though these techniques are simple, often the application of these techniques is very limited. Recently, use of machine learning methods such as neural networks for change detection has been explored with great success. In this work, we explore the use of ensemble learning methodologies for detecting changes in bitemporal synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. Ensemble learning uses a collection of weak machine learning classiers to create a stronger classier which has higher accuracy than the individual classiers in the ensemble. The strength of the ensemble lies in the fact that the individual classiers in the ensemble create a 'mixture of experts' in which the nal classication made by the ensemble classier is calculated from the outputs of the individual classiers. Our methodology leverages this aspect of ensemble learning by training collections of weak decision tree based classiers to identify regions of change in SAR images collected of a region in the Staten Island, New York area during Hurricane Sandy. Preliminary studies show that the ensemble method has approximately 11.5% higher change detection accuracy than an individual classier.