COMPARISON OF PIXEL-BASED AND FEATURE-BASED APPROACH FOR SMALL OBJECT CHANGE DETECTION

Abstract. Satellite image resolution has evolved to daily revisit and sub-meter GSD. Main targets of previous remote sensing were forest, vegetation, damage area by disasters, land use and land cover. Developments in satellite images have brought expectations on more sophisticated and various change detection of objects. Accordingly, we focused on unsupervised change detection of small objects, such as vehicles and ships. In this paper, existing change detection methods were applied to analyze their performances for pixel-based and feature-based change of small objects. We used KOMPSAT-3A images for tests. Firstly, we applied two change detection algorithms, MAD and IR-MAD, which are most well-known pixel-based change detection algorithms, to the images. We created a change magnitude map using the change detection methods. Thresholding was applied to determine change and non-change pixels. Next, the satellite images were transformed as 8-bit images for extracting feature points. We extracted feature points using SIFT and SURF methods to analyze feature-based change detection. We assumed to remove false alarms by eliminating feature points of non-changed objects. Therefore, we applied a feature-based matcher and matched feature points on identical image locations were eliminated. We used non-matched feature points for change/non-change analysis. We observed changes by creating a 5x5 size ROI around extracted feature points in the change/non-change map. We determined that change has occurred on feature points if the rate of change pixels with ROI was more than 50%. We analyzed the performance of pixel-based and feature-based change detection using ground truths. The F1-score, AUC value, and ROC were used to compare the performance of change detection. Performance showed that feature-based approaches performed better than pixel-based approaches.