Robust change detection in high resolution satellite images with geometric distortions

A robust change detection algorithm for high resolution satellite images, which are not perfectly registered, is proposed in this work. To achieve this goal, a change detection technique for registered images and an image registration technique are employed in a cooperative way. Specifically, we use not only hand-crafted features but also change detection results to match keypoints extracted from two images. We then align the images using the matching pairs of keypoints. Finally, we obtain a change map from the aligned images. These steps of image registration and change detection are alternately iterated until the convergence. Experimental results demonstrate that proposed algorithm outperforms the conventional change detection technique significantly, when there are geometric distortions between temporal satellite images.