Integrating map knowledge in satellite image analysis

With the rapid scientific and technical advances in remote sensing, digital image processing becomes an important tool for quantitative and statistical analysis of remotely sensed images. These images contain most often complex natural scenes. Robust interpretation of such images requires the use of different sources of information about the scenes under consideration. This paper presents our work on analyzing remotely sensed images by integrating multispectral data, map knowledge and contextual information. An overview of the approach is first described. Then the utilization of map knowledge to improve the effectiveness and robustness of urban area detection is explained in more details.