Conditional mixed-state model for structural change analysis from very high resolution optical images

Abstract

The present work concerns the analysis of dynamic scenes from earth observation images. We are interested in building a map which, on one hand locates places of change, on the other hand, reconstructs a unique visual information of the non-change areas. We show in this paper that such a problem can naturally be takled with conditional mixed-state random field modeling (mixed-state CRF), where the "mixed state" refers to the symbolic or continous nature of the unknown variable. The maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation of the CRF is, through the Hammersley-Clifford theorem, turned into an energy minimisation problem. We tested the model on several Quickbird images and illustrate the quality of the results.