Change Detection in SAR CCD Based on the Likelihood Change Statistics

The Coherent Change Detection (CCD) measures the phase difference in repeat passes in SAR images and is a powerful technique for detecting minute changes between two synthetic aperture radar images taken at different times. Nevertheless, the CCD has two problems. These are the high false-alarm rates and threshold selection. To deal with these problems using the likelihood change, this study makes two improvements. First, the model parameters are optimized by the maximum likelihood method and more accurate and robust parameters are obtained by using the sliding window in the neighborhood operations. Second, the automatic change in the threshold method is proposed based on the histogram characteristics of different data. The processing of real data suggests that the proposed method is effective in detecting minute changes.