Unsupervised change detection in SAR images using curvelet and L1-norm based soft segmentation

In this article, we propose a novel unsupervised change detection method for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. First, we generate a difference image as a weighted average of a log-ratio image and a mean-ratio image, which has the advantage of enhancing the information of changed regions and restraining the information of unchanged background regions simultaneously. Second, we propose a variational soft segmentation model based on non-differentiable curvelet regularization and L1-norm fidelity. Numerically, by using the split Bregman technique for curvelet regularization term and reformulating the L1-norm fidelity as weighted L2-norm fidelity, we get an effective algorithm in which each sub-problem has a closed-form solution. The numerical experiments and comparisons with several existing methods show that the proposed method is promising, with not only high robustness to non-Gaussian noise or outliers but also high change detection accuracy. Moreover, the proposed method is good at detecting fine-structured change areas. Especially, it outperforms other methods in preserving edge continuity and detecting curve-shaped changed areas.