Ocean surface change detection from remote sensing image based on stochastic similarity measure

ABSTRACT Change detection based on remote sensing images, has attracted increasing attention from researchers throughout the world. The synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images have become key resources for detecting changes on the land surface. However, due to the presence of speckle noise and its stochastic nature, SAR data require methodologies that consider these peculiarities. This article presents a similarity measure that considers the randomness present in SAR data. To retrieve the random component in the SAR data, we used the stochastic distance. The similarity measure is carefully elaborated as a function of the stochastic distance such that its variation space is the interval [0, 1], facilitating its interpretation. Our proposal shows promising results in two applications: contrast evaluation, ocean surface change detection and binary change map. It is noteworthy that the possible limitations of our proposal are investigated through simulations guided by a Monte Carlo experiment.