OBCD-HH: an object-based change detection approach using multi-feature non-seed-based region growing segmentation

Priti Bansal, Mayur Vaid, Shivam Gupta

Abstract: There is an increasing need to get updated information regarding the changes on earth’s surface. The information obtained can be used in a wide range of applications including disaster management, land-use investigation etc. The high-resolution remote sensing images obtained from satellites provide us with an opportunity to detect changes on earth’s surface between various time intervals. In this paper, an unsupervised object-based change detection (OBCD) method is proposed to detect changes in high resolution bi-temporal satellite images. To detect changes, a novel multi-feature non-seed-based region growing (MF-NSRG) algorithm is proposed for image segmentation based on heterogeneity minimization that uses textural heterogeneity along with spectral and spatial heterogeneity during region growing. The performance of MF-NSRG algorithm is further improved by using Harris Hawk, a recently proposed metaheuristic algorithm, which is used to obtain optimal values of segmentation parameters. Finally, the feature maps extracted from the pre-change and post-change segmented images are analysed using histogram trend similarity (HTS) approach to detect changes. The proposed approach is known as object-based change detection using Harris Hawk (OBCD-HH). The proposed OBCD-HH approach is applied on two datasets: xBD and Onera Satellite Change Detection (OSCD) dataset. Its performance is compared with existing state-of-the-art algorithms and results show the superiority of the proposed approach.