Airborne hyperspectral detection of small changes

Hyperspectral change detection offers a promising approach to detect objects and features of remotely sensed areas that are too difficult to find in single images, such as slight changes in land cover and the insertion, deletion, or movement of small objects, by exploiting subtle differences in the imagery over time. Methods for performing such change detection, however, must effectively maintain invariance to typically larger image-to-image changes in illumination and environmental conditions, as well as misregistration and viewing differences between image observations, while remaining sensitive to small differences in scene content. Previous research has established predictive algorithms to overcome such natural changes between images, and these approaches have recently been extended to deal with space-varying changes. The challenges to effective change detection, however, are often exacerbated in an airborne imaging geometry because of the limitations in control over flight conditions and geometry, and some of the recent change detection algorithms have not been demonstrated in an airborne setting. We describe the airborne implementation and relative performance of such methods. We specifically attempt to characterize the effects of spatial misregistration on change detection performance, the efficacy of class-conditional predictors in an airborne setting, and extensions to the change detection approach, including physically motivated shadow transition classifiers and matched change filtering based on in-scene atmospheric normalization.