Change detection from aerial images acquired in different durations

Because of quick development of cities, the update of urban GIS data is very important. Change detection is the base of automatic or semi-automatic data update. One way of change detections in urban area is based on old and new aerial images acquired in different durations. The corresponding theory and experiments are introduced and analyzed in this paper. The main procedure includes four stages. The new and old images have to be registered firstly. Then image matching, based on the maximum correlation coefficient, is performed between registered images after the low contrast areas have been removed. The regions with low matching quality are extracted as candidate changed areas. Thirdly, the Gaussian-Laplacian operator is used to detect edges in candidate changed areas on both the registered images, and the straight lines are detected by Hough transformation. Finally, the changed houses and roads can be detected on the basis of straight line matching in candidate changed areas between registered images. Some experimental results show that the method introduced in this paper is effective.