Relative radiometric normalization of bitemporal very high-resolution satellite images for flood change detection

Change-detection analysis using bitemporal satellite imagery is a reliable method for providing and assessing information about flood-induced changes over a wide area in a timely and cost-effective manner. Accurate radiometric normalization between bitemporal imagery is a critical component in the application of change-detection techniques to flood mapping because the accuracy of the change detection is directly affected by the quality of radiometric normalization. A methodology based on multivariate alteration detection (MAD) is introduced as an approach that enables reliable radiometric normalization of bitemporal very high-resolution (VHR) images for detecting flood-induced changes. The method uses a weighting function to adaptively identify weights based on open water features, which are estimated by the normalized difference water index, in the computation of the covariance matrices of the MAD transform. To quantitatively evaluate and test the performance of the proposed method, a comparison is made between it and the iteratively reweighted (IR)-MAD method based on statistical tests and the accuracy of flood change detection. Change vector analysis- and MAD-based change-detection methods were used for the comparison of the proposed and IR-MAD methods. Experimental results on KOMPSAT-2 bitemporal VHR images prove that the proposed method produced better results than the IR-MAD method in the statistical tests and also increased the overall accuracy of flood change detection by 1.8% and 12.6% for the two study sites. (C) The Authors. Published by SPIE under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.