Object-Based Image Analysis and Treaty Verification: New Approaches in Remote Sensing - Applied to Nuclear Facilities in Iran

With the launch of very high-resolution satellite sensors at the beginning of this decade (e.g. IKONOS, OrbView, QUICKBIRD) many important new remote se- ing applications have been developed. Major progress has been demonstrated in the accurate detection, identi?cation and analysis of small-scale, site-speci?c f- tures, including critical commercial and industrial facilities such as nuclear power plants. According to IAEA Director-General and 2005 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, the provision of the necessary information and guarantees for monitoring the Iranian nuclear programme is an urgent priority for the future. Today, satellite imagery analysis is an integral part of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) safeguards and veri?cations efforts and high-resolution commercial satellite imagery is an important component of this process. Several international studies have proven the usefulness and documented the - plicability of remotely sensed data for site veri?cation purposes. Recent important developments in satellite sensor capabilities and innovations in analytic techniques make it clear that this “hardware-software-complex” is changing and improving rapidly. This book documents the latest developments in satellite data analysis and comprehensively describes the process of extracting information from space-borne sensor data for site veri?cation purposes.

The availability of new high resolution satellite data brings with it the need for new image analysis methods. Traditional pixel-oriented algorithms do not give credit to the spatial coherence of high resolution imagery. In particular, for detection and classification of man-made structures, object-based procedures are much more appropriate. The use of object features such as scale, compactness, orientation and texture, in addition to spectral characteristics, extends the possibilities of remote sensing satellite image analysis considerably.

This book describes recent progress in object-based image interpretation, and also presents many new results in its application to verification of nuclear non-proliferation. A comprehensive workflow and newly developed algorithms for object-based high resolution image (pre-) processing, feature extraction, change detection, classification and interpretation are developed, applied and evaluated. The entire analysis chain is demonstrated with high resolution imagery acquired over Iranian nuclear facilities.