Boundary-constrained multi-scale segmentation method for remote sensing images

Abstract Image segmentation is the key step of Object-Based Image Analysis (OBIA) in remote sensing. This paper proposes a Boundary-Constrained Multi-Scale Segmentation (BCMS) method. Firstly, adjacent pixels are aggregated to generate initial segmentation according to the local best region growing strategy. Then, the Region Adjacency Graph (RAG) is built based on initial segmentation. Finally, the local mutual best region merging strategy is applied on RAG to produce multi-scale segmentation results. During the region merging process, a Step-Wise Scale Parameter (SWSP) strategy is proposed to produce boundary-constrained multi-scale segmentation results. Moreover, in order to improve the accuracy of object boundaries, the property of edge strength is introduced as a merging criterion. A set of high spatial resolution remote sensing images is used in the experiment, e.g., QuickBird, WorldView, and aerial image, to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The segmentation results of BCMS are compared with those of the commercial image analysis software eCognition. The experiment shows that BCMS can produce nested multi-scale segmentations with accurate and smooth boundaries, which proves the robustness of the proposed method.