The Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) has many attractive and desired features to cope with uncertain weather conditions and also provides superlative resolution in images. In this paper, a unique multiscale approach of change detection (CD) that integrates the preprocessing and CD technique of SAR imagery is discussed. Condensed anisotropic diffusion method is employed as a preprocessing tool for despeckling, and the resultant image is processed by multiscale approach in the Laplacian pyramid (LP) domain. In each layer of LP, the difference between the pyramid coefficient of two images of the same area obtained at different periods is estimated through log ratio operation. Each layer of pyramid coefficient has explicit features at particular scale. Fine scale related to a band pass layer localizes edges of the change area and the coarse scale related to a low pass layer preserves more detail information of the change region. Reconstruction of LP provides exact difference image with perfect boundary. Otsu's algorithm is used to generate binary change map to distinguish changed and unchanged pixels. The efficiency of the proposed method is tested by using simulated and real SAR image datasets. The confusion matrix parameters are used to prove competence of the proposed CD method. © 2019, © 2019 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.