ATGP based Change Detection in Hyperspectral Images

Hyperspectral images (HSIs) due to advancements in spatial-spectral resolutions and availability of multi-temporal information is in demand for many remote sensing (RS) applications including change detection (CD). The high dimensionality of HSIs and limited availability of HSI-CD data sets with ground-truth change maps make CD not so easy but a difficult task. Though there are many classical and deep learning (DL) based algorithms to detect changes, the performance of classical algorithms is not up to the satisfactory level and the final performance of DL models depend on efficiency of pre-detection techniques which provide prior knowledge on changed and unchanged areas that are required to get appropriate training samples to learn to detect changes. Classical and DL approaches consider change information at pixel level i.e. pixel to pixel change either by comparing the corresponding pixels alone or with their local neighborhood pixels. Therefore, identification of features for every pixel that relate the most significant information of the whole HSI-CD data in a simple and an efficient way to detect changes effectively is the need of the hour. In addition, there is not much comprehensive study on developing CD algorithms that not only simple to use but also as efficient as that of DL models is available. Therefore, in this paper, an endmember based feature extraction is proposed to detect changes in HSI. An automatic target generation process (ATGP) algorithm is adapted to extract endmembers present in the HSI-CD data set. Then, various spectral matching algorithms are used to measure endmember relations for all the pixels so that dimensionality of the data is reduced as well as the effective features to detect changes can be extracted. The experimental results on three benchmark HSI-CD data sets show that proposed ATGP based change vector analysis (CVA) algorithm yields remarkable results on comparing both with the classical as well as DL based CD approaches.