Kernel Slow Feature Analysis for Scene Change Detection

Scene change detection between multitemporal image scenes can be used to interpret the variation of regional land use, and has significant potential in the application of urban development monitoring at the semantic level. The traditional methods directly comparing the independent semantic classes neglect the temporal correlation, and thus suffer from accumulated classification errors. In this paper, we propose a novel scene change detection method via kernel slow feature analysis (KSFA) and postclassification fusion, which integrates independent scene classification with scene change detection to accurately determine scene changes and identify the “from-to” transition type. After representation with the bag-of-visual-words model, KSFA is proposed to extract the nonlinear temporally invariant features, to better measure the change probability between corresponding multitemporal image scenes. Two postclassification fusion methods, which are based on Bayesian theory and predefined rules, respectively, are then employed to identify the optimal coupled class combinations of multitemporal scene pairs. Furthermore, in addition to identifying semantic changes, the proposed method can also improve the performance of scene classification, since the unchanged scenes are more likely to belong to the same class. Two experiments with high-resolution remote sensing image scene data sets confirm that the proposed method can increase the accuracy of scene change detection, scene transition identification, and scene classification.