A hypergraph-based context-sensitive representation technique for VHR remote-sensing image change detection

This article presents a novel semi-supervised change detection approach for very-high-resolution (VHR) remote-sensing images. The proposed approach aims at extracting the change information by making full use of the context-sensitive relationships among pixels in the images. This is accomplished via a context-sensitive image representation technique based on hypergraph model. First, each temporal image is modelled as a hypergraph that utilizes a set of hyperedges to capture the context-sensitive properties of pixels in the image. Second, the difference in the bi-temporal images is measured by both the similarity and the consistency between the two hypergraphs. Finally, the changes are separated from the unchanged ones by a hypergraph-based semi-supervised classifier on the difference image. Experimental results obtained on different VHR remote-sensing data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.