Combining Satellite Images with Feature Indices for Improved Change Detection

This paper presents a novel approach to detect changes in satellite images taken from the same location at different timestamps. Different change detection methods are applied to multispectral satellite images taken with the Worldview-2 (WV-2) satellite, as well as to several of their feature indices such as normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), normalized difference soil index (NDSI), non-homogeneous feature index (NHFD) and red-blue ratio (R/B). Besides, an additional image is used to remove temporary changes like vehicles, persons etc. The combination of changes is computed with a set of pixel-wise operations, and morphological filters are applied to improve the final change map. The combination of the satellite images with their feature indices proved to produce better results than computing the changes independently. This paper summarizes the methodology and presents the results obtained.