scholarly journals A Fast and Effective Method for Unsupervised Segmentation Evaluation of Remote Sensing Images

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (18) ◽  
pp. 3005
Author(s):  
Maofan Zhao ◽  
Qingyan Meng ◽  
Linlin Zhang ◽  
Die Hu ◽  
Ying Zhang ◽  
...  

The segmentation of remote sensing images with high spatial resolution is important and fundamental in geographic object-based image analysis (GEOBIA), so evaluating segmentation results without prior knowledge is an essential part in segmentation algorithms comparison, segmentation parameters selection, and optimization. In this study, we proposed a fast and effective unsupervised evaluation (UE) method using the area-weighted variance (WV) as intra-segment homogeneity and the difference to neighbor pixels (DTNP) as inter-segment heterogeneity. Then these two measures were combined into a fast-global score (FGS) to evaluate the segmentation. The effectiveness of DTNP and FGS was demonstrated by visual interpretation as qualitative analysis and supervised evaluation (SE) as quantitative analysis. For this experiment, the ‘‘Multi-resolution Segmentation’’ algorithm in eCognition was adopted in the segmentation and four typical study areas of GF-2 images were used as test data. The effectiveness analysis of DTNP shows that it can keep stability and remain sensitive to both over-segmentation and under-segmentation compared to two existing inter-segment heterogeneity measures. The effectiveness and computational cost analysis of FGS compared with two existing UE methods revealed that FGS can effectively evaluate segmentation results with the lowest computational cost.

Author(s):  
A. R. Soares ◽  
T. S. Körting ◽  
L. M. G. Fonseca ◽  
A. K. Neves

Abstract. Segmentation is a fundamental problem in image processing and a common operation in Remote Sensing, which has been widely used especially in Geographic Object-Based Image Analysis (GEOBIA). In this paper, we propose a new unsupervised segmentation algorithm based on the Conditional Random Fields (CRF) theory. The method relies on two levels of information: (1) that comes from an unsupervised classification with Fuzzy C-Means algorithm; (2) the 8-connected neighbourhood of a pixel. The algorithm was tested on a WorldView-2 multispectral image, with 2 m of spatial resolution. Results were evaluated using 6 quality measures, and their performance was compared with other image segmentation algorithms that are usually applied by the Remote Sensing community. Results indicate that the proposed algorithm achieved superior overall performance when compared others, despite some over-segmentation.


Author(s):  
Raechel A. Bianchetti

Remote sensing image analysis training occurs both in the classroom and the research lab. Education in the classroom for traditional pixel-based image analysis has been standardized across college curriculums. However, with the increasing interest in Geographic Object-Based Image Analysis (GEOBIA), there is a need to develop classroom instruction for this method of image analysis. While traditional remote sensing courses emphasize the expansion of skills and knowledge related to the use of computer-based analysis, GEOBIA courses should examine the cognitive factors underlying visual interpretation. This current paper provides an initial analysis of the development, implementation, and outcomes of a GEOBIA course that considers not only the computational methods of GEOBIA, but also the cognitive factors of expertise, that such software attempts to replicate. Finally, a reflection on the first instantiation of this course is presented, in addition to plans for development of an open-source repository for course materials.


Author(s):  
Raechel A. Bianchetti

Remote sensing image analysis training occurs both in the classroom and the research lab. Education in the classroom for traditional pixel-based image analysis has been standardized across college curriculums. However, with the increasing interest in Geographic Object-Based Image Analysis (GEOBIA), there is a need to develop classroom instruction for this method of image analysis. While traditional remote sensing courses emphasize the expansion of skills and knowledge related to the use of computer-based analysis, GEOBIA courses should examine the cognitive factors underlying visual interpretation. This current paper provides an initial analysis of the development, implementation, and outcomes of a GEOBIA course that considers not only the computational methods of GEOBIA, but also the cognitive factors of expertise, that such software attempts to replicate. Finally, a reflection on the first instantiation of this course is presented, in addition to plans for development of an open-source repository for course materials.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (6) ◽  
pp. 1060
Author(s):  
Luc Baudoux ◽  
Jordi Inglada ◽  
Clément Mallet

CORINE Land-Cover (CLC) and its by-products are considered as a reference baseline for land-cover mapping over Europe and subsequent applications. CLC is currently tediously produced each six years from both the visual interpretation and the automatic analysis of a large amount of remote sensing images. Observing that various European countries regularly produce in parallel their own land-cover country-scaled maps with their own specifications, we propose to directly infer CORINE Land-Cover from an existing map, therefore steadily decreasing the updating time-frame. No additional remote sensing image is required. In this paper, we focus more specifically on translating a country-scale remote sensed map, OSO (France), into CORINE Land Cover, in a supervised way. OSO and CLC not only differ in nomenclature but also in spatial resolution. We jointly harmonize both dimensions using a contextual and asymmetrical Convolution Neural Network with positional encoding. We show for various use cases that our method achieves a superior performance than the traditional semantic-based translation approach, achieving an 81% accuracy over all of France, close to the targeted 85% accuracy of CLC.


2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (8) ◽  
pp. 1193 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yongji Wang ◽  
Qingwen Qi ◽  
Ying Liu

Image segmentation is an important process and a prerequisite for object-based image analysis. Thus, evaluating the performance of segmentation algorithms is essential to identify effective segmentation methods and to optimize the scale. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised evaluation (UE) method using the area-weighted variance (WV) and Jeffries-Matusita (JM) distance to compare two image partitions to evaluate segmentation quality. The two measures were calculated based on the local measure criteria, and the JM distance was improved by considering the contribution of the common border between adjacent segments and the area of each segment in the JM distance formula, which makes the heterogeneity measure more effective and objective. Then the two measures were presented as a curve when changing the scale from 8 to 20, which can reflect the segmentation quality in both over- and under-segmentation. Furthermore, the WV and JM distance measures were combined by using three different strategies. The effectiveness of the combined indicators was illustrated through supervised evaluation (SE) methods to clearly reveal the segmentation quality and capture the trade-off between the two measures. In these experiments, the multiresolution segmentation (MRS) method was adopted for evaluation. The proposed UE method was compared with two existing UE methods to further confirm their capabilities. The visual and quantitative SE results demonstrated that the proposed UE method can improve the segmentation quality.


2012 ◽  
Vol 532-533 ◽  
pp. 732-737
Author(s):  
Xi Jie Wang ◽  
Xiao Fan Zhao

This paper presents a new multi-resolution Markov random field model in Contourlet domain for unsupervised texture image segmentation. In order to make full use of the merits of Contourlet transformation, we introduce the taditional MRMRF model into Contourlet domain, in a manner of variable interation between two components in the tradtional MRMRF model. Using this method, the new model can automatically estimate model parameters and produce accurate unsupervised segmentation results. The results obtained on synthetic texture images and remote sensing images demonstrate that a better segmentation is achieved by our model than the traditional MRMRF model.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (22) ◽  
pp. 4528
Author(s):  
Xin Yang ◽  
Lei Hu ◽  
Yongmei Zhang ◽  
Yunqing Li

Remote sensing image change detection (CD) is an important task in remote sensing image analysis and is essential for an accurate understanding of changes in the Earth’s surface. The technology of deep learning (DL) is becoming increasingly popular in solving CD tasks for remote sensing images. Most existing CD methods based on DL tend to use ordinary convolutional blocks to extract and compare remote sensing image features, which cannot fully extract the rich features of high-resolution (HR) remote sensing images. In addition, most of the existing methods lack robustness to pseudochange information processing. To overcome the above problems, in this article, we propose a new method, namely MRA-SNet, for CD in remote sensing images. Utilizing the UNet network as the basic network, the method uses the Siamese network to extract the features of bitemporal images in the encoder separately and perform the difference connection to better generate difference maps. Meanwhile, we replace the ordinary convolution blocks with Multi-Res blocks to extract spatial and spectral features of different scales in remote sensing images. Residual connections are used to extract additional detailed features. To better highlight the change region features and suppress the irrelevant region features, we introduced the Attention Gates module before the skip connection between the encoder and the decoder. Experimental results on a public dataset of remote sensing image CD show that our proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art (SOTA) CD methods in terms of evaluation metrics and performance.


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