Statistically normalized coherent change detection for synthetic aperture sonar imagery

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.