Improved Change Detection Method for Flood Monitoring

Abstract

An improved Hybrid Change Detection (HCD) method is proposed for multi-temporal Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images. Firstly, a Pixel-Based Change Detection (PBCD) method is used to extract the initial change area, and the initial cluster center is estimated based on its results. Then, Fuzzy Clustering Method (FCM) is used to get three clusters, which including water, background, and the intermediate area. The Nearest Neighbor Clustering (NNC) is adopted as the second-level clustering to divide the pixels belonging to the intermediate area into water and background respectively, afterwards merge all pixels belonging to water. Finally, the difference map of flood region in the time series images is calculated to get the final change detection result. The algorithm is validated by the Sentinel-1A data obtained from Huaihe River and Poyang Lake. The results show that our proposed method can achieve better correctness and has lower total error compared to other methods.