Change Detection of High Spatial Resolution Images Based on Region-Line Primitive Association Analysis and Evidence Fusion

Change detection (CD) remains an important issue in remote sensing applications, especially for high spatial resolution (HSR) images, but it has yet to be fully resolved. This work proposes a novel object-based change detection (OBCD) method for HSR images that is based on region–line primitive association analysis and evidence fusion. In the proposed method, bitemporal images are separately segmented, and the segmentation results are overlapped to obtain the temporal region primitives (TRPs). The temporal line primitives (TLPs) are obtained by straight line detection on bitemporal images. In the initial CD stage, Dempster–Shafer evidence theory fuses the multiple items of evidence of the TRPs’ spectrum, edge, and gradient changes, and obtains the initial changed areas. In the refining CD stage, the association between the TRPs and their contacting TLPs in the unchanged areas is established on the basis of the region–line primitive association framework, and the TRPs’ main line directions (MLDs) are calculated. Some changed TRPs omitted in the initial CD stage are recovered by their MLD changes, thereby refining the initial CD results. Different from common OBCD methods, the proposed method considers the change evidence of TRPs’ internal and boundary information simultaneously via information complementation between TRPs and TLPs. The proposed method can significantly reduce missed alarms while maintaining a low level of false alarms in OBCD, thereby improving total accuracy. In our experiments, our method is superior to common CD methods, including change vector analysis (CVA), PCA-k-means, and iterative reweighted multivariate alteration detection (IRMAD), in terms of overall accuracy, missed alarms, and Kappa coefficient.