Detection of Land-Cover Transitions in Multitemporal Remote Sensing Images with Active Learning Based Compound Classification

This paper presents a novel iterative active learning (AL) technique aimed at defining effective multitemporal training sets to be used for the supervised detection of land-cover transitions in a pair of remote sensing images acquired on the same area at different times. The proposed AL technique is developed in the framework of the Bayes' rule for compound classification. At each iteration, it selects the pair of spatially aligned unlabeled pixels in the two images that are classified with the maximum uncertainty. These pixels are then labeled by an external supervisor and included in the training set. The uncertainty of a pair of pixels is assessed by the joint entropy defined by considering two possible different simplifying assumptions: 1) class-conditional independence and 2) temporal independence between multitemporal images. Accordingly, different algorithms are introduced. The proposed joint-entropy-based AL algorithms for compound classification are compared with each other and with a marginal-entropy-based AL technique (in which the entropy is computed separately on single-date images) applied to the postclassification comparison method. The experimental results obtained on two multispectral and multitemporal data sets show the effectiveness of the proposed technique.