Change detection: The potential for nuclear safeguards

Abstract

4 Conclusions and Outlook: An object-oriented monitoring system for nuclear safeguards purposes was proposed in order to detect changes within nuclear facilities. By means of pixel-based change detection and object-oriented post-classification by eCognition some investigations were carried out in terms of automation, thus standardization and transferability. As a result, medium-resolution imagery could be considered as suitably for change-/no change-analysis in terms of wide area monitoring, for the detailed object-oriented analysis of significant changes high-resolution satellite imagery should be used. The automation and the transferability of the change detection and analysis procedures appears to be feasible to a certain extent, therewith giving rough and fast indications of areas of interest and explicitly analyzing the relevant areas. For the advanced analysis of nuclear sites (using high-resolution imagery), a detailed classification model furthermore has to be able to differentiate between nuclear and non-nuclear industrial sites and preferably between the different types of facilities within the nuclear sites class, too. Though the preliminary results within this project and previous approaches on the automated object-oriented classification of German nuclear power plans have been somewhat promising up to now, a lot of case studies have to be performed for a comprehensive understanding of the nuclear sites signatures identifiable in satellite imagery. Furthermore, the attempts to extract the objects features automatically have to be continued and the accuracy of the classification in terms of spatial and temporal transferability needs to be assessed in detail. Satellite imagery will never provide all the relevant information needed for nuclear safeguards and security, but represents a very important source of information. The developments in sensor technologies (spatial, spectral improvements) and thus the increasing application possibilities of satellite imagery for nuclear safeguards have to be permanently investigated and evaluated. © 2006 Springer Berlin · Heidelberg. © 2006 Springer Berlin · Heidelberg.