BAYESIAN ALGORITHMS FOR ADAPTIVE CHANGE DETECTION IN IMAGE SEQUENCES USING MARKOV RANDOM-FIELDS

In many conventional methods for change detection, the detections are carried out by comparing a test statistic, which is computed locally for each location on the image grid, with a global threshold. These 'nonadaptive' methods for change detection suffer from the dilemma of either causing many false alarms or missing considerable parts of non-stationary areas. This contribution presents a way out of this dilemma by viewing change detection as an inverse, ill-posed problem. As such, the problem can be solved using prior knowledge about typical properties of change masks. This reasoning leads to a Bayesian formulation of change detection, where the prior knowledge is brought to bear by appropriately specified a priori probabilities. Based on this approach, a new, adaptive algorithm for change detection is derived where the decision thresholds vary depending on context, thus improving detection performance substantially. The algorithm requires only a single raster scan per picture and increases the computional load only slightly in comparison to non-adaptive techniques.