Unsupervised change detection on SAR images using fuzzy hidden Markov chains

This work deals with unsupervised change detection in temporal sets of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. We focus on one of the most widely used change detector in the SAR context, the so-called log-ratio. In order to deal with the classification issue, we propose to use a new fuzzy version of hidden Markov chains (HMCs), and thus to address fuzzy change detection with a statistical approach. The main characteristic of the proposed model is to simultaneously use Dirac and Lebesgue measures at the class chain level. This allows the coexistence of hard pixels (obtained with the classical HNIC segmentation) and fuzzy pixels (obtained with the fuzzy measure) in the same image. The quality assessment of the proposed method is achieved with several bidate sets of simulated images, and comparisons with classical HNIC are also provided. Experimental results on real European Remote Sensing 2 Precision Image (ERS-2 PRI) images confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach.