Normalized Compression Distance for SAR Image Change Detection

With a continuous increase in multi-temporal synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images, leading to enable mapping applications for Earth environmental observation, the number of algorithms for detection of different types of terrain changes has greatly expanded. In this paper, a SAR image change detection method based on normalized compression distance (NCD) is proposed. The procedure mainly consists in dividing two time series images in patches, computing a collection of similarities corresponding to each pair of patches and generating the change map with a histogram-based threshold. The experimental results were computed using 2 Sentinel 1A images over the city of Bucharest, Romania and 2 TerraSAR-X images over the Elbe River and its surrounding area, Germany.