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A novel feature descriptor for automatic change detection in remote sensing

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DOI: 10.1016/j.ejrs.2018.03.005

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Research Paper

A novel feature descriptor for automatic change detection in remote

sensing images q
C.P. Dalmiya a,1,⇑, N. Santhi a,2, B. Sathyabama b,3
a
Department of ECE, Noorul Islam Centre for Higher Education, Kumaracoil, Thuckalay, Kanyakumari, Tamil Nadu 629180, India
b
Department of ECE, Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai, Tamil Nadu 625015, India

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Automatic change detection has expected increasing interest for researchers in recent years on high-
Received 12 August 2017 spatial resolution remote sensing system where multispectral, multi-resolution and multimodal images
Revised 1 March 2018 can be acquired. The commonly used techniques for high-resolution change detection rely on feature
Accepted 19 March 2018
extraction. Due to its high dimensional feature space, the conventional feature extraction techniques rep-
Available online xxxx
resent a progress of issues when handling huge size information e.g., computational cost, processing
capacity and storage load. In order to overcome the existing drawback, we propose a novel Structural
Keywords:
Phase Congruency Histogram (SPCH) descriptor for automatic change detection without reducing the sig-
Change detection
Feature extraction
nificant loss of information. The proposed feature extractor depends upon the structural properties of the
Classifier image which is invariant to contrast deviations and illumination. The structural phase congruency with
Dimension reduction the histograms is combined to build the edge and corner features. The dimensionality of the feature vec-
tor is reduced using Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) to form SPCH-LDA descriptor which leads to be
more robust for image scale variations. Finally, the accuracy of the change detection is estimated with
Artificial Neural Network (ANN) as compared with the existing algorithms. The experimental results pro-
vided 98.4375% accuracy which confirms the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed technique for
automatic change detection.
Ó 2018 National Authority for Remote Sensing and Space Sciences. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.
V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-
nc-nd/4.0/).

1. Introduction application involved in multi-temporal datasets. Automatic change

Remote Sensing images are generally utilized for viewing the
urban extension and land cover changes at a medium to enable
the advancement of urbanization and propel the practical
improvement process. In remote sensing applications, changes
are considered as surface component alterations with varying
rates. Change detection is one of the main applications of remote
sensing that quantitatively examines the temporal impacts of
Peer review under responsibility of National Authority for Remote Sensing and
Space Sciences.
⇑ Corresponding author.
E-mail address: dalmiya2017@gmail.com (C.P. Dalmiya).
1
Current designation details with college name: Research Scholar, ECE Depart-
ment, Noorul Islam Centre for Higher Education, Kumaracoil, Thuckalay, Kanyaku-
mari, Tamil Nadu 629180, India.
2
Current designation details with college name: Associate Professor, ECE Depart-
ment, Noorul Islam Centre for Higher Education, Kumaracoil, Thuckalay, Kanyaku-
mari, Tamil Nadu 629180, India.
3
Current designation details with college name: Associate Professor, ECE Depart-
ment, Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai, Tamil Nadu 625015, India.
detection expects to identify land cover variations between two
registered remote sensing images obtained over the same topo-
graphical location at two diverse time moments (Neagoe et al.,
2014). The general objectives of change detection in remote sens-
ing include identifying the geographical location and type of
changes, quantifying the changes, and assessing the accuracy of
change detection results (Hussain et al., 2013). Change detection
from multi-temporal remotely sensed images is widely used in
many fields, such as land use/land cover change (Amini and
Hesami, 2017), irrigated land change (Hesami and Amini, 2016)
urban growth, forest and vegetation dynamics, and disaster moni-
toring, since many types of changes can be extracted at local, regio-
nal, and global scale (Du et al., 2013; Chen et al., 2012a,b). In
change detection of remote sensing images, the researchers mainly
focussed on change measure, and then they created methods for
classifying changed features (Liu et al., 2012).
Generally, change detection methods can be partitioned into
two classes: supervised and unsupervised. The supervised classifi-
cation needs learning knowledge about the study territory for
training the detection module, for example, Artificial Neural

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejrs.2018.03.005
1110-9823/Ó 2018 National Authority for Remote Sensing and Space Sciences. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V.
This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Please cite this article as: C. P. Dalmiya, N. Santhi and B. Sathyabama, , The Egyptian Journal of Remote Sensing and Space Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1016/
j.ejrs.2018.03.005
2 C.P. Dalmiya et al. / Egypt. J. Remote Sensing Space Sci. xxx (xxxx) xxx
Network (ANN), Post-Classification Comparison (PCC), and Support
Vector Machine (SVM). The unsupervised classes (Gong et al.,
2012a,b; Bovolo et al., 2012), performs an investigation directly
or indirectly on the first multi-temporal images to acquire change
data if the earlier information is inaccessible, for example, spectral
rationing, image differencing, Change Vector Analysis (CVA), Prin-
cipal Component Analysis (PCA), etc. (Gu et al., 2015). There train-
ing patterns for data to learn the classifier is not required in
unsupervised class (Mishra et al., 2012). Regardless of the way that
these unsupervised techniques can perform change detection
without earlier data and with a decreased computational weight,
the vast majority of them permit just the detection of quality of
changes yet don’t separate various types of change (Du et al.,
2012; Ghosh et al., 2013; Huang et al., 2014; Tian et al., 2013;
Weng, 2012; Gong et al., 2012a,b; Tang et al., 2013; Wang et al.,
2013; Chen et al., 2012a,b; Hansen and Loveland, 2012; Demir
et al., 2013). This process may prompt a critical loss of data, a cor-
ruption of the accuracy of the change detection procedure, and an
inability to recognize a few sorts of change (Benedek et al., 2015;
Kupfer et al., 2015). There are some investigations deployed to
get interesting and valuable findings in change detection process.
Gong et al. (2012a,b) exhibited a deep learning based change
detection approach for Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images.
This approach achieved the detection of the changed and
unchanged territories by planning a deep neural system. The learn-
ing method for deep designs incorporated unsupervised feature
learning and supervised fine-tuning to complete classification. This
change detection method was hard to recognize the weaker
changes and the better changes in multi temporal remote sensing
images. Volpi et al. (2013) introduced context based supervised
change detection that extracted the contextual features for each
scene and then combined in a specific multi-temporal classifica-
tion scheme. This leads to hitch in adapting object representations
depending on scene context to account for changes in illumination,
viewpoint changes, etc.
Principal component analysis (PCA) was applied for feature
extraction prior to the change detection. The components with
the lowest variance were retained as the extracted features
because they are more likely to be affected by a change. A semi-
parametric log likelihood change detection criterion is chosen that
is sensitive to changes in both mean and variance of the multidi-
mensional distribution (Kuncheva and Faithfull, 2014). The princi-
pal components in PCA are usually linear combinations of all
variables, which make the process difficult to understand the vari-
ables. Zhang et al. (2016) proposed multi-spatial-resolution change
detection structure based on the incorporation of sparse denoising
auto encoder feature learning and mapping-based feature change
analysis. The accuracy was constrained because of its feature vec-
tors even if the possibility that the multi-spatial-resolution change
detection issue was contemplated. Wen et al. (2016) implemented
a multi-index automatic change detection technique for the high-
resolution symbolism. This method represented the complicated
high-resolution scenes by a set of low-dimensional semantic
indexes. Nagarajan and Schenk (2016) defined a Time Invariant
Line (TIL) features technique for registering authentic images.
These TIL features were diverse description of a similar line fea-
tures in multi-temporal information without precise point-to-
point or straight line-to-straight line correspondence. Here, remov-
ing the introduction of the images was inadequate so the accuracy
is limited. Lu et al. (2017) proposed an enhanced sparse coding
technique for change detection. The instinct of this technique
was that the unchanged pixels in various images were recon-
structed by the joint dictionary. Despite the fact that these tech-
niques give careful consideration for enhancing the change
detection precision, they regularly neglect to adjust different infor-
mation in various conditions. To be sure, a few variables, including
Please cite this article as: C. P. Dalmiya, N. Santhi and B. Sathyabama, , The Egyptian Journal of Remote Sensing and Space Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1016/
j.ejrs.2018.03.005
nearby barometrical conditions, light, and sensor adjustment, may
change the phantom reaction of various locales and may cause
radiometric fluctuation. Though, these works provided significant
classification and feature determination for various data analysis,
these methods has a lack of some significant parameters. Since,
there is a lack in providing accurate assessment, correct feature
extraction and classifications; it can’t predict the correct change
detection. Moreover, those works provided high error rates accord-
ing to such parameters, which results a challenge in locating
changes in multidimensional unlabeled data. Hence providing
effective feature extraction prior to classification is beneficial pro-
vides superior results in change detection.
The main objective of the research is to develop a novel feature
extraction based automatic change detection technique for reduc-
ing the significant loss of data and improve the accuracy. The pro-
posed SPCH feature descriptor first captures the amplitude and
orientation based on the local phase of an image. Then, it extracts
the corners and edges which is invariant to illumination and con-
trast changes. After extracting the SPCH feature vectors, the Linear
Discriminant Analysis (LDA) works as a dimensionality reduction
algorithm. After reducing, neural network model is applied to clas-
sification task for the classification of change detection. Finally, the
proposed feature extraction technique is compared with the popu-
lar feature extraction techniques for change detection.
2. Methodology
First an urban scene multispectral image dataset is taken as the
input data base. The proposed work is divided into three stages: (i)
Pre-processing, (ii) Feature Extraction and (iii) Classification. The
architecture of the proposed work is given in Fig. 1.
2.1. Input data base
In this work, the multi spectral remote sensing images taken
from the database are given as input to the proposed automatic
change detection technique.
( 
xi ðtÞ 
X¼  i; j ¼ 1; 2; . . . ; N ð1Þ
yj ðtÞ 
where X is the image database, xi(t) is the original image and yj(t) is
the reference image.
2.2. Pre-processing
The RGB image in the database is changed into Gray scale image
using normal colour space transformation. Let us consider the
input RGB image X of dimension M  N is changed into a gray scale
image that can be represented as,
X g ¼ 0:229R þ 0:587G þ 0:114B ð2Þ
In the above Eq. (2), R (red) is with [95, 255, 67] pixels, G (green)
with [140, 234, 145] pixels, and B (blue) with [233, 180, 190] pixel
parts of the RGB image. The dimensionality of the image data can
be decreased and the image visual features can be expanded
because of colour change. In addition, the training multifaceted
nature is decreased, which increases the handling capacity.
2.3. Block tiling
The fundamental process after pre-processing is the block tiling,
in which the image is isolated into a progression of blocks and each
block comprises of M  N pixels. This will decrease the computa-
tional time during training phase by finding the similar vector.
The grey scale image Xg is split into M  N pixel blocks along from
 C.P. Dalmiya et al. / Egypt. J. Remote Sensing Space Sci. xxx (xxxx) xxx 3

2.4. Proposed SPCH descriptor for feature extraction

SPCH descriptor depicted in Fig. 2 is a novel structural feature

descriptor for extracting the corners and edge features of the
remote sensing images for automatic change detection.

2.4.1. Step 1: phase congruency computation

Basically, the corners and edges of the computerized images is
localized and detected with the help of phase congruency which
was developed by Kovesi (2003). Phase congruency on the blocks
of the multi spectral remote sensing images which extract the
edges and corners that is especially powerful against changes in
contrast and illumination.
Let us consider the input blocks as the input periodic signal
characterized in the range [p, p]. Local energy Le and phase con-
gruency are greater when the Fourier parts of the input signal
meet at the edges. The standardization with the entire sum of
all Fourier components amplitude A(z) turns the phase congru-
ency into a dimensionless amount. Hence, the phase congruency
is given by:
L
PC ¼ Pe ð5Þ
xþ z AðzÞ

where x is a small number to avoid division by zero, z is the ori-

ented phase.
Eq. (5) shows that the peak points in the local energy is related
to the peak points in phase congruency, which signifies that the
phase congruency does not rely up on making the features invari-
ant to scale, overall magnitude of the signal, contrast and illumina-
tion variations. Consider the input image block f(k) and Hilbert
transform fH(k). Then the local energy function Le represented as,
qffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
2 2
Le ¼ f ðkÞ þ f H ðkÞ ð6Þ

Phase congruency can be computed by convolving the two

dimensional signal with a pair of quadrature filters to extract the
local frequencies and phase information. A proficient band pass fil-
ter called Log-Gabor filter which extract the neighbourhood phase
Fig. 1. Architecture of the proposed system.
data spread over a wide range. The log-Gabor filter has the transfer
function HLG(b) given by:
the upper left corner to the most minimal right corner. The over-
2
!
lapping blocks are specified as, ðlogðb=bo ÞÞ
HLG ðbÞ ¼ exp 1=2 ð7Þ
ðlogðv =bo ÞÞ
2
T b ðs; tÞ ¼ f ðs þ r; t þ cÞ ð3Þ
where r is the row and c is the column of the blocks from the initial The centre frequency of the filter is given as bo. Then from the
points. Here, s; t 2 ½0; . . . ; T b  1; r 2 ½1; . . . ; M  m þ 1 above equation, m/bo is kept constant for various bo. The transfer
and c 2 ½1; . . . ; N  n þ 1. function of 2-D log-Gabor filter, which was built by utilizing Gaus-
Thus, the image Xg can be divided into / blocks for an image as, sian function in the angular direction is represented by:
      !
2
ðM  mÞ ðN  nÞ ðlogððh þ ho ÞÞÞ
/¼ þ1  þ1 ð4Þ HLG ðhÞ ¼ exp 1=2 ð8Þ
D D g2h
where D is the block distance.

Fig. 2. Process flow of the proposed SPCH feature descriptor.

Please cite this article as: C. P. Dalmiya, N. Santhi and B. Sathyabama, , The Egyptian Journal of Remote Sensing and Space Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1016/
j.ejrs.2018.03.005
4 C.P. Dalmiya et al. / Egypt. J. Remote Sensing Space Sci. xxx (xxxx) xxx

The orientation centre of the filter is denoted as ho, and standard

deviation is denoted as gh for the Gaussian function in angular
direction. Let us assume two even and odd symmetric functions
Me#o and M o#o of the Log-Gabor filter to form a quadrature pair at
scale # and orientation o. The response vector at scale n and orien-
tation O is obtained by the convolution of each quadrature pair
with the input image I(x,y) and is given by:

½e#o ðx; yÞ; o#o ðx; yÞ ¼ ½ðIðx; yÞ  Me#o ; Iðx; yÞ  Mo#o  ð9Þ
The amplitude of the response A#o and phase angle w#o at scale #
and orientation o is given by:
qffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
A#o ¼ ðe2#o ðx; yÞ þ o2#o ðx; yÞÞ ð10Þ

 
o# ðx; yÞ
w#o ðx; yÞ ¼ tan1 ð11Þ
e# ðx; yÞ
Referring to Eq. (6), F(x,y) and FH(x,y) are given by:
XX
Fðx; yÞ ¼ e#o ðx; yÞ ð12Þ
o n

XX
F H ðx; yÞ ¼ o#o ðx; yÞ ð13Þ
o n Fig. 3. Three dimensions representation of the elements in tricubic interpolation.

Hence, phase congruency PC(x,y) of the 2D signal can be com-

puted over various scales and orientation as:
sffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
 2 
P P P x;y;z¼0
o e#o ðx; yÞ þ o#o ðx; yÞ
# n
PCðx; yÞ ¼ PP
e þ o # A#o ðx; yÞ
The orientation angle
 
F H ðx; yÞ
uðx; yÞ ¼ tan1
Fðx; yÞ
The phase congruency level lies in between 0 and 1. The SPCH
feature vector can be constructed for the whole image blocks after
computing the phase congruency and its corresponding orientation
angle.
2.4.2. Step 2: calculate the gradient images
To ascertain a Histogram of Oriented Gradient (HOG) descriptor,
we have to first compute the vertical and horizontal angles; This is
effectively accomplished by separating the image into local parts.
The gradient has a magnitude and a direction at each pixel.
2.4.3. Step 3: vote phase congruency magnitude into spatial and
oriented bins
Presently, the image is isolated into nearby areas of blocks with
various sizes. Every square block comprises of 2  2 cells with a
cell size of 8  8 pixels. These pieces of blocks are half covered.
At last, the general SPCH for the whole image is built by linking
the entire histograms extracted from each blocks into one feature
vector, which represents the SPCH features. Based on the direction,
a bin is nominated, and the vote is preferred based on the
magnitude.
2.4.4. Step 4: tricubic interpolation
The histogram is weighted using a tricubic interpolation strat-
egy. We assume that a function T is given at the corner of a regular
mesh. Also assume that the element is a cube of side 1 without loss
of generality, as in Fig. 3. Tricubic interpolation is a technique for
getting intensity esteems at self-assertive points in 3D space of a
function characterized on a consistent grid. We denote that the
function T as a piecewise polynomial. Inside each block, T takes
the qualities given by a statement of the accompanying structure:
X
N
2ffi Tðp; q; rÞ ¼ axyz p x q y r z ð16Þ
ð14Þ where the N3 coefficients axyz must be resolved in view of the infor-
mation and the required level of smoothness, P,q,r is a linear con-
straints, p; q; r 2 ½0; 1 . The subsequent capacity T, obviously, is
C1 inside every component. The general smoothness of T relies
ð15Þ upon the properties of T and its subordinate on the characteristics
of the features.
2.4.5. Step 5: block normalization
Gradients of an image are very sensitive to general lighting. On
the off chance that when the image is darker by isolating all pixel
esteems by 2, the inclination greatness will change considerably,
and in this way the histogram esteems will change significantly.
In a perfect world, it requires a new descriptor to be free of lighting
varieties. At the end, there is need to ‘‘standardize” the histogram
so they are not influenced by lighting varieties. To standardize a
vector over a greater measured square of 16  16, just standardize
the histogram utilizing L2 standard. A 16  16 piece has 4 his-
tograms which can be connected to shape of 36  1 feature vector
and it can be standardized quite recently the way a 3  1 vector is
standardized. The window is then moved by 8 pixels and a stan-
dardized 36  1 vector is ascertained over this window and the
procedure is rehashed.
2.4.6. Step 6: calculate the feature vector
To find out the last feature vector for the whole image patch, the
36  1 vectors are connected into one mammoth vector. At that
point, the SPCH descriptor of an image patch is typically envisioned
by plotting the 9  1 standardized histograms in the 8  8 cells.
2.5. Dimensionality reduction using LDA
The goal of LDA is to perform dimensionality reduction while
saving the class discriminatory information with good class-
separability in order to avoid over fitting (‘‘curse of dimensional-
ity”) and also diminish computational costs. Linear Discriminant
Analysis (LDA) is a classification technique initially created in
1936 by R.A. Fisher. It is basic, numerically strong and frequently

Please cite this article as: C. P. Dalmiya, N. Santhi and B. Sathyabama, , The Egyptian Journal of Remote Sensing and Space Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1016/
j.ejrs.2018.03.005
 C.P. Dalmiya et al. / Egypt. J. Remote Sensing Space Sci. xxx (xxxx) xxx 5

delivers model whose accuracy is in the same class as more mind from the proposed feature extraction technique are given to the
boggling strategies. LDA depends on the idea of hunting down a input neuron of ANN. The two major stages of ANN are training
straight mix of factors (indicators) that best isolates two classes and testing. The feature vectors from the original image (recent
(targets). To catch the thought of detachability, Fisher character- image) and the reference image (existing image) is given as input
ized the accompanying score work. to the network. Considering the percentage of training and testing
Consider Z ¼ b1 x1 þ b2 x2 þ . . . þ bd xd samples, the neural network train the features in the training
phase and assign the weight for prediction of the changed pixels.
bT l1  bT l2 The basic operation of the ANN includes: First the feature vec-
SðbÞ ¼ ð17Þ
bT Cb tors (input neuron) is given to the hidden layer. Every input node
The model coefficients can be defined as, is multiplied with the weights and finally summed up to get the
predicted results of change detection at the output layer. The
b ¼ C 1 ðl1  l2 Þ ð18Þ expected outcome of the neural network is mathematically
expressed as,
Then the pooled covariance matrix 0 1
1 X
N
1
O@
C¼ ðn1 C 1 þ n2 C 2 Þ ð19Þ C¼ u x
 P A ð22Þ
y¼1 F y uxy
n1 þ n2 x¼1 1 þ exp  M I

where, b is the linear model coefficient, C1, C2 is the covariance

In the above equation, the input feature vector is given as F y , the
matrices, l1, l2 is the mean vectors.
weight allocated to input and hidden layer as uIxy , the weight allo-
One method for evaluating the viability of the segregation is to
compute the Mahalanobis distance between two clusters. Cluster- cated to the hidden and output layer as uOx and the total number of
ing more prominent than 3 mean in two midpoints vary by more hidden neurons represented as N. Then, the hidden layer also fol-
than 3 standard deviations. It implies that the cover (likelihood lows the same procedure. Finally, the result from the output layer
of misclassification) is very little. is compared with the target to predict the change detection results.
The learning error rate of the neural network is given as
D2 ¼ bT ðl1  l2 Þ ð20Þ
ðQ o  Ro Þ2
D is the Mahalanobis distance between two groups.
gL ¼ ð23Þ
2
Eventually, the maximal direction is separated by generating
new point and classified that as C1 if: From the above equation, the Lth learning error is represented as
   gL , the output as Q o and the real output as Ro . The weight is
ðl1 þ l2 Þ PðC 1 Þ adjusted to optimize the performance in training the neural net-
bT x  > log ð21Þ
2 PðC 2 Þ work using back propagation algorithm.

Algorithm 1: Proposed Automatic Change Detection

bT is the vector of coefficients, x is the vector for data.
ðl1 þl2 Þ
Input: Two test sensing same images taken on two different
2
is the vector for mean. years.
1Þ
log PðC
PðC 2 Þ
is the probability of class. 1) Pre-processing
2) Block tiling for hot spot detection
2.6. Artificial neural network 3) Structural Phase Congruency Histogram (SPCH) descriptor
 Select a window from the image with definite size.
After extracting the features, LDA based dimensionality reduc-  Then calculate the phase congruency amplitude and
tion is applied on the feature vectors. Then the reduced feature orientation to extract the feature information for each
vectors are given as input to the neural network for recognizing pixel of the specific template.
the changes in the image.  Secondly, the template image is separated into overlap-
Normally, ANN has three main layers such as input, hidden and ping blocks as spatial regions with cells having pixels.
output layer as depicted in Fig. 4. The features vectors extracted  In the next step, collect all local histogram for each cell
from phase congruency orientations and each cell in the
block are divided into number of orientation bins to
form orientation histograms.
 The histogram is weighted using a tricubic interpola-
tion method.
 L2 norm for normalize the histogram within overlap-
ping blocks of cells to attain an improved robustness
against illumination changes.
 Finally, collect the extracted feature for all blocks over
the template window.
 Dimensionality reduction using LDA
4) Feature vectors are extracted and given to the ANN classi-
fier part for change detection
 70% for training of two images
 15% for testing of two images
 15% for validation
Output: Change detection results

Fig. 4. Basic structure of ANN.

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6 C.P. Dalmiya et al. / Egypt. J. Remote Sensing Space Sci. xxx (xxxx) xxx
3. Experimental result and discussion
The proposed feature extraction based change detection is
implemented in the MATLAB 2017a software. The dataset is taken
from the Santa Barbara region (California) with the AVIRIS sensor
during 2013 and 2014 to perform change detection techniques.
The multi-temporal hyperspectral images from the dataset having
224 spectral bands whose spatial dimensions are 984  740 pixels.
The longitude of dataset having 119.7445915 (in degree) and lat-
itude is 34.400275 (in degree). Our proposed method is compared
with the existing techniques such as Semi-supervised Novelty
Detection (SSND) (Morsier et al., 2013), Change Vector Analysis
(CVA) (Bovolo and Bruzzone, 2007), Principal Component Analysis
(PCA) (Deng et al., 2008), SSFA (Wu et al., 2014), Iteratively
Reweighted Multivariate Alteration (IRMAD (Canty and Nielsen,
2008), and Gray Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM) (Haralick
et al.,1973).
3.1. Input database
The multi spectral remote sensing images are considered as
database for the proposed framework. The images taken from the
database is given as input to the proposed automatic change detec-
tion technique, which is shown in Fig. 5.
3.2. SPCH descriptor for feature extraction
SPCH descriptor extracted the corners and edge features of the
remote sensing images for automatic change detection depicted in
Fig. 6.
While computing the phase congruency, the neighbourhood
areas of the images is separated into block = 16  16 pixels,
block = 2  2 cells, and each cell = 8  8 pixels. Each cell is dis-
cretized into angular bins according to the orientation interval.
The phase congruency magnitude and its orientation are computed
in each pixel of the input image. At last, the general SPCH for the
whole image is built by linking the entire histograms extracted
from each blocks into one feature vector, which represents the
SPCH features.
Fig. 5. Input image (a) Barbara 2013,(b) Barbara 2014.
Please cite this article as: C. P. Dalmiya, N. Santhi and B. Sathyabama, , The Egyptian Journal of Remote Sensing and Space Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1016/
j.ejrs.2018.03.005
3.3. Automatic change detection using ANN
After extracting the features, LDA based dimensionality reduc-
tion is applied on the feature vectors. Then the reduced feature
vectors are provided as input to the neural network for recognizing
the changes in the image.
Finally, the classifier provides the detection results as repre-
sented in Fig. 7. In Fig. 7, the black colour represents the changed
pixels and the white colour represents the unchanged pixels. In
the quantitative analysis, widely used criteria is adopted in evalu-
ating the performance of change detection methods The execution
is assessed as far as TP, FP, TN, FN, Precision, Recall, F-Measure,
TNR, FPR, FNR, Accuracy and kappa coefficient. The false negatives
(FNs) can be represented as changed pixels that undetected and
the false positives (FPs) are calculated as unchanged pixels
wrongly detected as changed. TN denotes true negative, the num-
ber of pixels which are correctly classified as unchanged, and TP
denotes true positive, the number of pixels which are correctly
classified as changed. F1 score is a measure of classification accu-
racy, which considers both the precision P and the recall R of the
test to compute the score. The F1 score reaches its best value at
1 and worst at 0 and it can be calculated as follows: F1 ¼ PþR
2PR
, where
P ¼ TPþFP
TP
, R ¼ TPþFN
TP
.
The quantitative analysis for the changes in two different
images based on F1-score and CCR is represented in Fig. 8 as graph-
ical representation. The different shapes and colours represent the
analysis of the feature changes. The traditional methods utilize tex-
tural and morphological features, which is actually an indirect
description of structures in the image scenes. The dimensionality
of the component vectors utilizing LDA provides reduced feature
vector to form proposed SPCH-LDA descriptor that leads to more
robust for image scale variations. Moreover, another notable
advantage of the proposed method is that the histogram dimen-
sionality of each block is much smaller than that for the traditional
low-level feature representation and hence, the proposed approach
needs less storage space and computational cost.
Fig. 9 represents the comparison graph of ROC curves with var-
ious configurations of cells (4  4, 6  6, and 8  8) to quantita-
tively demonstrate the impact of parameter n. It can be clearly
 C.P. Dalmiya et al. / Egypt. J. Remote Sensing Space Sci. xxx (xxxx) xxx 7

Fig. 6. SPCH feature descriptor (a) Barbara 2013, (b) Barbara 2014.

Fig. 7. Detected changes using ANN (a) Barbara 2013, (b) Barbara 2014.

seen that the histograms become more sensitive to the imaging

parameters. Subsequently, the histograms for the features are pro-
duced by quantizing the features into bins (the quantization level)
for every cell. Similarly, each block is signified by stacking the fea-
ture histograms of the entire cells. It can be found that the, 6  6,
and 8  8 cells accomplished comparable and attractive outcomes
in terms of the ROC graphs, outflanking the 4  4 block based
approach. On one hand, a huge estimation of n can depict the struc-
tural arrangement of primitives in a scene more sufficiently. Alter-
natively, a huge estimation of n may prompt to over representation
of an image scene, which needs more difficult computation, which
does not provide notable performance. Higher peak point of the
graphical representation denotes that the structural arrangement
in that particular scene is more.
In a change detection scenario, the major changes and major-to-
medium changes resulted in a higher number of changes that are Fig. 8. Performance analysis of change detection on F1 Score and CCR

Please cite this article as: C. P. Dalmiya, N. Santhi and B. Sathyabama, , The Egyptian Journal of Remote Sensing and Space Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1016/
j.ejrs.2018.03.005
8 C.P. Dalmiya et al. / Egypt. J. Remote Sensing Space Sci. xxx (xxxx) xxx

chance agreement for the accuracy measure is specified as Kappa

coefficient. The actual number of pixels belongs to the unchanged
and changed class is represented as Mu and Mc. The Kappa is cal-
culated as Kappa ¼ PCCPRE
1PRE
, where PRE ¼ ðTPþFPÞMcþðFNþTNÞMu
ðTPþFPþFNþTNÞ2
. The
results for the Evaluation Metrics Over State-of-the-Art Methods
on Dataset are shown in Table I. The analysis of the various
performances is evaluated in the Table 1. The table evaluates the
TP, TN, FP, FN, precision, recall, F-Measure, TNR, FPR, FNR, PCC,
kappa, overall accuracy and overall error of the proposed method
provide negligible performance as compared with the GLCM
technique. Our proposed method achieved the best result among
the traditional methods with Precision 98.0392, Recall = 100,
F-measure = 99.0099 and Overall Accuracy (AUC) = 98.4375. There-
fore, the proposed method is capable of achieving satisfactory
Fig. 9. ROC curves with different configurations of cells (4  4, 6  6, and 8  8) for
the proposed automatic change detection method. change detection accuracy with a set of low-level feature vector
with dimensionality reduction method.
Accuracy assessment is a vital part in remote sensing change
detected by the proposed method. In order to evaluate the binary detection applications, and is essential for understanding the
change detection methods, the following measures are computed: detected change results and utilizing these outcomes for land man-
True Negative Rate (TNR = TN/(TN + FP)), False Negative Rate agement, urban land planning, and decision-making. The most
(FNR = FN/(TP + FN)), False Positive Rate (FPR = FP/(FP + TN)), Per- widely utilized method for accuracy assessment is to provide an
centage correct classification (PCC) or correct classification rate error matrix which can be utilized as a starting point for a series
ðTPþTNÞ of descriptive and analytical statistical analysis. The related assess-
(CCR) is represented as PCC ¼ ðTPþFPþFNþTNÞ,
Overall error (OE) is the sum of FN and FP, Overall Accuracy ment elements incorporate overall accuracy and kappa coefficient
(OA) is the ratio of sum of correctly identified pixels to the number which was depicted in Table 2. SSND, CVA and PCA did not perform
of total test pixels and the difference among the error matrix and well in this experiment which provides less AUC and Kappa Coef-
ficients when compared with the existing method. In the kappa
curves, CDT and GLCM are also mostly above IRMAD and SSFA.
Table 1 We can clearly see that our proposed SPCH method performed
Evaluation metrics over state-of-the-art methods. best, with regard to the kappa coefficients and AUC values, in most
Metrics/Method GLCM Proposed Method
cases when compared with GLCM, CVA, PCA, SSND, SSFA, and
IRMAD.
TP 50 50
FP 1 1
The existing CVA technique is a bi-temporal method that was
TN 11 13 originally designed for specified analysis based on the Euclidian
FN 2 0 distance to calculate the change vector. But some of the environ-
Precision 98.0392 98.0392 mental disturbance factors affect the whole system, which are
Recall 96.1538 100.00
reduced by proposed descriptor. On the other hand, the GLCM
F-Measure 97.0873 99.0099
TNR 96.1538 100.0000 one of the existing methods used for image analysis and change
FPR 92.8571 92.8571 detection. It is mainly used for the texture analysis with the limi-
FNR 100.0000 100.0000 tations of classifying large primitives. Since these limitations are
PCC 85.20 95.41 eliminated by means of the SPCH parameters, the performance of
kappa 92.31 97.43
Overall accuracy 95.3125 98.4375
the proposed SPCH-LDA dimensionality reduction scheme for the
Overall error 3 1 change detection is improved. Globally, SPCH performs better com-
pared with GLCM for automatic change detection.

Table 2
Overall accuracy (AUC) and kappa coefficients over state-of-the-art methods on experiment dataset.

Metrics SSND CVA PCA SSFA IRMAD CDT GLCM Proposed

kappa 75.36 78.04 77.67 93.12 95.49 96.65 92.31 97.43
AUC 60.225 62.013 62.019 83.138 87.019 89.681 95.3125 98.4375

Table 3
Accuracy results for change detection (correctly classified pixel, Missed Alarm (MA), False Alarm (FA), and total error), in terms of number of pixel and percentages for the Santa
Barbara dataset.

Configuration Correctly Classified Pixels MA FA Total error

EUC + EM 110,065 (83.04%) 7990 14,497 22,487 (16.96%)
EUC + Otsu 110,348 (83.25%) 9866 12,338 22,204 (16.75%)
SAM + Otsu 125,598 (94.75%) 4147 2807 6954 (5.25%)
EUC + WAT + Otsu 115,101 (86.83%) 7842 9609 17,451 (13.17%)
SAM + WAT + EM 126,389 (95.35%) 1765 4398 6163 (4.65%)
SAM + WAT + Otsu 128,523 (96.96%) 3011 1018 4029 (3.04%)
Proposed 130,821 (99.25%) 1517 1009 2165 (2.48%)

Please cite this article as: C. P. Dalmiya, N. Santhi and B. Sathyabama, , The Egyptian Journal of Remote Sensing and Space Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1016/
j.ejrs.2018.03.005
 C.P. Dalmiya et al. / Egypt. J. Remote Sensing Space Sci. xxx (xxxx) xxx
Table 3 represents various configurations (Lopez-Fandino et al.,
2017) such as Spectral Angle Mapper (SAM), Expectation Maxi-
mization (EM), Euclidean distance (EUC), Watershed Algorithm
(WAT) and Otsu algorithm with proposed method. These configu-
rations calculate the correct pixel value, MA, FA and the total error
occurs in each configurations. Table 3 (for the Santa Barbara data-
set) show the accuracies obtained using the previously introduced
framework (SAM + WAT + Otsu) with CVA (Change Vector Analy-
sis) based on SAM distance and Otsu’s thresholding, along with
other configurations included for comparison purposes. EUC + EM
can be used as a reference to compare with the other methods
which includes Euclidean distance and Expectation-
Maximization. SAM + WAT + EM and SAM + WAT + Otsu add the
same spatial processing to the configuration that uses SAM dis-
tance. Also, the comparison demonstrates that the proposed
method provides FA can achieve significantly better performance
than the traditional feature methods, since the former gave much
correctness score with more false alarm rate. The false alarms are
caused due to the geometrical difference between the bi-
temporal high-resolution images (e.g., diverse viewing angles).
However, this kind of false alarm can be effectively suppressed
by the proposed method, due to the tolerance of the histograms
to the geometrical differences. Therefore the proposed framework
provides very good change detection results, achieving up to
99.25% of correctly classified pixels for the Santa Barbara datasets.
4. Conclusion
A novel SPCH feature descriptor is described for the automatic
change detection with the arrangement of objects represented in
the remote sensing multi spectral data at multiple time instants
in the same scene. The major advantage of the proposed feature
extraction techniques over the existing works achieves high accu-
racy of 98.4375% on high resolution images with low level feature
vector and also classified the pixel correctly by 99.25%. The novel
feature descriptors localize and identify the image details espe-
cially in the regions which were affected due to contrast and illu-
mination changes. This technique detected the changes in the
remote sensing images with less error of 2.48%. The performance
for the detection of changes is improved with the help of LDA
dimensionality reduction scheme. The qualitative and quantitative
results showed that our proposed technique outperformed the
other state-of-the-art techniques, with better kappa coefficients
of 0.97 and AUC values of 98.4375% on the whole.
Conflict of interest
There are no known conflicts of interest.
Acknowledgements
We express our sincere thanks to DST, New Delhi, India for the
financial support under INSPIRE fellowship scheme for the above
research work.
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