A 3D Space-Time Non-Local Mean Filter (NLMF) for Land Changes Retrieval with Synthetic Aperture Radar Images

Sequences of multi-temporal synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images are routinely used for land-use land-change (LULC) applications, allowing the retrieval of accurate and up-to-date information on the state of the Earth's surface and its temporal variations. Change detection (CD) methods that rely on the exploitation of SAR data are, generally, made of three distinctive steps: (1) pre-processing of the SAR images; (2) comparison of the pairs of SAR images; and (3) the automatic extraction of the "changed areas", employing proper thresholding algorithms. Within this general framework, the reduction in speckle noise effects, which can be obtained by applying spatial multi-looking operations and ad hoc noise filters, is fundamental for the better detecting and classifying of changed regions. Usually, speckle noise filters are singularly and independently applied to every SAR image without the consideration of their inherent temporal relationships. In particular, most use local (spatial) approaches based on determining and averaging SAR backscattered signals related to neighboring SAR pixels. In this work, conversely, we explore the potential of a joint 3D space-time non-local mean filter (NLMF), which relies on the discrimination of similar features in a block of non-local SAR pixels extracted from the same or different SAR images. The theory behind non-local-mean filters is, first, shortly revised. Then, the developed space-time NLMF is applied to a real test case for the purposes of identifying flooded zones due to the massive inundations that hit the Kerala region, India, during the summer of 2018. To this aim, a set of 18 descending SAR images collected from the European (EU) Copernicus Sentinel-1 (S-1) sensor was exploited. The performance of the developed NLMF has also been assessed. It is worth remarking that the proposed method can be applied for the purposes of analyzing a heterogenous set of natural and/or artificial disastrous conditions. Further, it can also be helpful during the pre-processing stages of the sequences of SAR images for the purposes of CD applications.