Coherent Change Detection (CCD) is a process of highlighting an area of activity in scenes (seafloor) under survey and generated from pairs of synthetic aperture sonar (SAS) images of approximately the same location observed at two different time instances. The problem of CCD and subsequent anomaly feature extraction/detection is complicated due to several factors such as the presence of random speckle pattern in the images, changing environmental conditions, and platform instabilities. These complications make the detection of weak target activities even more difficult. Typically, the degree of similarity between two images measured at each pixel locations is the coherence between the complex pixel values in the two images. Higher coherence indicates little change in the scene represented by the pixel and lower coherence indicates change activity in the scene. Such coherence estimation scheme based on the pixel intensity correlation is an ad-hoc procedure where the effectiveness of the change detection is determined by the choice of threshold which can lead to high false alarm rates. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for anomalous change pattern detection using the statistical normalized coherence and multi-pass coherent processing. This method may be used to mitigate shadows by reducing the false alarms resulting in the coherent map due to speckles and shadows. Test results of the proposed methods on a data set of SAS images will be presented, illustrating the effectiveness of the normalized coherence in terms statistics from multi-pass survey of the same scene.

Date Published: 3 May 2016
PDF: 13 pages
Proc. SPIE 9823, Detection and Sensing of Mines, Explosive Objects, and Obscured Targets XXI, 98231T (3 May 2016); doi: 10.1117/12.2223793

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9823:
Detection and Sensing of Mines, Explosive Objects, and Obscured Targets XXI
Steven S. Bishop; Jason C. Isaacs, Editor(s)