SAR Image Change Detection Based on Joint Dictionary Learning With Iterative Adaptive Threshold Optimization

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image change detection is still a challenge due to inherent speckle noise and scarce datasets. This article proposes a joint-related dictionary learning algorithm based on the k-singular value decomposition (K-SVD) algorithm called JR-KSVD and an iterative adaptive threshold optimization (IATO) algorithm for unsupervised change detection. The JR-KSVD algorithm adds dictionary correlation learning to the K-SVD algorithm to generate a uniform initial dictionary for dual-temporal SAR images, thereby reducing the instability of sparse representations due to atomic correlations and enhancing the extraction of image edges and details. The IATO approach employs thresholds obtained by the “difference-log ratio” fusion image for indefinite residual energy minimization iterations to gradually shrink the threshold variation range and finally generate the change images, which have a high degree of adaptivity and strong real-time performance. Finally, experiments on six real datasets demonstrate that the proposed algorithm exhibits superior detection performance and robustness against some state-of-the-art algorithms.