A New Approach to Change Vector Analysis Using Distance and Similarity Measures

The need to monitor the Earth’s surface over a range of spatial and temporal scales is fundamental in ecosystems planning and management. Change-Vector Analysis (CVA) is a bi-temporal method of change detection that considers the magnitude and direction of change vector. However, many multispectral applications do not make use of the direction component. The procedure most used to calculate the direction component using multiband data is the direction cosine, but the number of output direction cosine images is equal to the number of original bands and has a complex interpretation. This paper proposes a new approach to calculate the spectral direction of change, using the Spectral Angle Mapper and Spectral Correlation Mapper spectral-similarity measures. The chief advantage of this approach is that it generates a single image of change information insensitive to illumination variation. In this paper the magnitude component of the spectral similarity was calculated in two ways: as the standard Euclidean distance and as the Mahalanobis distance. In this test the best magnitude measure was the Euclidean distance and the best similarity measure was Spectral Angle Mapper. The results show that the distance and similarity measures are complementary and need to be applied together.