Agent based image analysis (ABIA) - preliminary research results from an implemented framework

Object Based Image Analysis (OBIA) has meanwhile been established as a paradigm for analyzing remotely sensed image data. Although the degree of automation for OBIA methods has increased for several applications, especially in the domain of remote sensing, robust and transferable object-based solutions for automated image analysis of sets of images or even large image archives are still rare. One of the reasons for this lack of robustness and transferability is the high complexity of remote sensing image contents: Especially in Very High Resolution (VHR) remote sensing data, under varying imaging conditions or sensor characteristics, the objects’ properties can vary unpredictably. Although earlier work has demonstrated that OBIA rule sets bear a high potential of transferability these rule sets need to be adapted manually in order to receive acceptable results, or the classification results need to be adjusted manually in a post-processing step. In order to automate these adaptation and adjustment procedures we investigate the coupling, extension and integration of OBIA with the agent-based paradigm, which is exhaustively investigated in software engineering and robotics. The aims of such integration are a) rule sets which can be adapted autonomously according to varying imaging data, and b) image objects which can adapt and adjust themselves in order to best possibly represent the objects of interest in an image. This paper briefly introduces a framework for Agent Based Image Analysis (ABIA) and presents our first research results.