Supervised fusion approach of local features extracted from SAR images for detecting deforestation changes

International audience; Deforestation has become a major problem consisting of a continuous regression of forested areas in the world, and for this purpose, an efficient detection of these changes has become more than necessary. In this work, a new method for deforestation change detection is proposed. This approach is based on a supervised fusion of local texture features extracted from SAR images. ALOS PALSAR (Advanced Land Observation Satellite Phased Array type L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar) multi-temporal data have been used in this work. Normalised radar cross-section (NRCS) and polarimetric features extracted from HH and HV polarised data allowed recognising different categories of land covers termed as NRCS classification. Grey-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) texture features were extracted by using a different moving window sizes applied on local regions previously obtained by binarisation of the NRCS results. A total of 300 samples of regions and five GLCM characteristics have been used here. The detection of deforestation appears clearly in the resulted images with a very satisfactory precision of the reached regions, and the obtained results of the proposed supervised approach have indeed led to very good detection results of the deforestation change.