Abstract:
High-quality optical data is difficult to acquire in southwest China, due to the cloudy and rainy weather. The synthetic aperture radar (SAR) can work for all-time and all-weather, but the revisit period is usually long. Therefore, it is a high demand for the synergy of optical and radar data rather than a single remote sensing data source, particularly for the survey and assessment on the land resource, as well as the global change. This study performed an object-oriented guided segmentation on the difference images generated from 2016 and 2019 quad-pol Radarsat-2 data using the 2019 Sentinel-2 optical data of Meishan region. A Fractal Net Evolution Approach (FNEA) was first utilized to segment the 2016 optical image for an initial segmentation. Then, the second segmentation was implemented using the same approach, where the features of the SAR image were provided for the purpose of guided segmentation. As such, the regions of growth were merged from small to large, in order to eventually form a complete geographical object. A final segmentation was obtained to select the changed and unchanged samples. More importantly, an object contained both changed and unchanged pixels, particularly with a single type of pixel inside the samples. Then, the object-level multidimensional features were extracted using the samples. The initial radar parameters included the backward scattering coefficient, Pauli and Freeman-Durden polarization decomposition parameters. The segmentation was utilized to generate the geographic objects. Meanwhile, some parameters were calculated using the initial parameters, including the mean, and standard deviation, whereas, the texture feature parameters using the Gray-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) included the mean, standard deviation, homogeneity, contrast, entropy, and the correlation for a total of 72-dimensional features. The redundant feature dataset was filtered to select the extracted feature set. Consequently, an FSO-RF change detection framework was proposed to achieve the feature optimization and the acquisition of the final change detection. The inter-sample distance metric learning was used to optimize the separability of feature space. The optimal features were used to calculate the distance between the changed and unchanged samples in different features. Finally, the change detection task was implemented using an object-oriented random forest classifier. The existing change detection pixel-based methods were selected to verify the improved model, including the change vector analysis (CVA), principal component analysis (PCA), multivariate alteration detection (MAD), Iteration multivariate alteration detection (IR-MAD), support vector machines (SVM), and random forest (RF) change detection using radar difference image segmentation. The change detection framework showed a remarkable improvement, with an overall accuracy of 92.90% in the test area. Two representative areas were selected in the study area for sampling and validation. The experiments demonstrated that better performance was achieved than that of the traditional, although the accuracy indexes were degraded in some areas with the complex features. The overall accuracies of the two sample areas reached 95.08 % and 88.16%. The algorithm in this paper can well meet the needs of detecting changes in different feature categories such as towns and farmlands, and has certain application value in the monitoring of national land resources.