USE OF GABOR FILTERS FOR TEXTURE CLASSIFICATION OF AIRBORNE IMAGES AND LIDAR DATA

In this paper, a texture approach is presented for building and vegetation extraction from LIDAR and aerial images. The texture is very important attribute in many image analysis or computer vision applications. The procedures developed for texture problem can be subdivided into four categories: structural approach, statistical approach, model based approach and filter based approach. In this paper, different definitions of texture are described, but complete emphasis is given on filter based methods. Examples of filtering methods are Fourier transform, Gabor and wavelet transforms. Here, Gabor filter is studied and its implementation for texture analysis is explored. This approach is inspired by a multi-channel filtering theory for processing visual information in the human visual system. This theory holds that visual system decomposes the image into a number of filtered images of a specified frequency, amplitude and orientation. The main objective of the article is to use Gabor filters for automatic urban object and tree detection. The first step is a definition of Gabor filter parameters: frequency, standard deviation and orientation. By varying these parameters, a filter bank is obtained that covers the frequency domain almost completely. These filters are used to aerial images and LIDAR data. The filtered images that possess a significant information about analyzed objects are selected, and the rest are discarded. Then, an energy measure is defined on the filtered images in order to compute different texture features. The Gabor features are used to image segmentation using thresholding. The tests were performed using set of images containing very different landscapes: urban area and vegetation of varying configurations, sizes and shapes of objects. The performed studies revealed that textural algorithms have the ability to detect buildings and trees. This article is the attempt to use texture methods also to LIDAR data, resampling into regular grid cells. The obtained preliminary results are interesting.