Detecting changes of the Yellow River Estuary via SAR images based on a local fit-search model and kernel-induced graph cuts

The Yellow River Estuary area of China is under great pressure from both human intervention and natural processes. For analysis of the changes in this area, this article presents a novel change-detection method based on a local fit-search model and kernel-induced graph cuts in multitemporal synthetic aperture radar images. Change detection involves assigning a label to every pixel. This task is naturally formulated in terms of energy minimization, which can be effectively solved by graph cuts. The difference image is transformed implicitly by a kernel function so that an alternative to complex modelling of the original data makes the piecewise constant model become applicable for graph cuts formulation. An issue is that graph cuts are sensitive to the initial estimate. The local fit-search model is proposed to approximate to the local histogram while selecting an optimal threshold for the initial labelling, which leads to an effective constraint for graph cuts and computational benefits as well. Visual and quantitative analyses obtained on the Yellow River Estuary data set confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method and that it outperforms the other state-of-the-art methods of change detection.