Conditional mixed-state model for structural change analysis from very high resolution optical images

The present work concerns the analysis of dynamic scenes from earth observation images. We are interested in building a map which, on one hand locates places of change, on the other hand, reconstructs a unique visual information of the non-change areas. We show in this paper that such a problem can naturally be takled with conditional mixed-state random field modeling (mixed-state CRF), where the ¿mixed state¿ refers to the symbolic or continous nature of the unknown variable. The maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation of the CRF is, through the Hammersley-Clifford theorem, turned into an energy minimisation problem. We tested the model on several Quickbird images and illustrate the quality of the results.