An onboard automatic change detection system for disaster monitoring

This paper presents a new approach to disaster monitoring using an automatic change detection system onboard small satellites that features image tiling and fuzzy inference. Unlike other onboard change detection systems for satellites, the proposed system performs change detection on an image tile level rather than on a pixel-by-pixel basis. This image tiling approach allows for more robust change detection performance in the presence of misregistration errors. An important block in the automatic change detection system is the fuzzy inference engine, which generates control signals that trigger different onboard tasks such as image compression, issuing of warning alerts, transmission and rescheduling. The proposed scheme uses not only spectral information as the input data but also cloud cover information to improve the change detection results. Experimental results on accuracy of change detection and flood detection using satellite images are presented.