A High-Reliability, High-Resolution Method for Land Cover Classification Into Forest and Non-forest

We present several methods for per-region land-cover classification based on distances on probability distributions and whole-region probabilities. We present results on using this method for locating forest areas in high-resolution aerial images with very high reliability, achieving more than 95% accuracy, using raw radiometric channels as well as derived color and texture features. Region boundaries are obtained from a multi-scale hierarchical segmentation or from a registration of cadastral maps.

[1]  H. Cramér Mathematical methods of statistics , 1947 .

[2]  Donald Geman,et al.  Stochastic relaxation, Gibbs distributions, and the Bayesian restoration of images , 1984 .

[3]  Peter M. Atkinson,et al.  Predicting missing field boundaries to increase per-field classification accuracy , 2004 .

[4]  Jia-Ping Wang,et al.  Stochastic Relaxation on Partitions With Connected Components and Its Application to Image Segmentation , 1998, IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell..

[5]  J. Kiefer,et al.  Asymptotic Minimax Character of the Sample Distribution Function and of the Classical Multinomial Estimator , 1956 .

[6]  C. D. Kemp,et al.  Density Estimation for Statistics and Data Analysis , 1987 .

[7]  G. Schwarz Estimating the Dimension of a Model , 1978 .

[8]  A. J. W. De Wit,et al.  Efficiency and accuracy of per-field classification for operational crop mapping , 2004 .

[9]  David A. Clausi,et al.  Unsupervised image segmentation using a simple MRF model with a new implementation scheme , 2004, Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Pattern Recognition, 2004. ICPR 2004..

[10]  T. Minor,et al.  Detecting and discriminating impervious cover with high-resolution IKONOS data using principal component analysis and morphological operators , 2003 .

[11]  Paul Scheunders,et al.  Wavelet correlation signatures for color texture characterization , 1999, Pattern Recognit..

[12]  Marc Pierrot Deseilligny,et al.  A region-based method for graph to image registration with an application to cadastre data , 2004, 2004 International Conference on Image Processing, 2004. ICIP '04..

[13]  Roger Trias-Sanz,et al.  An Edge-based Method for Registering a Graph onto an Image with Application to Cadastre Registration , 2004 .

[14]  Caroline Baillard Analyse d'images aeriennes stereoscopiques pour la restitution 3-d des milieux urbains. Detection et caracterisation du sursol , 1997 .

[15]  Chad Hendrix,et al.  A Comparison of Urban Mapping Methods Using High-Resolution Digital Imagery , 2003 .

[16]  Andrew O. Finley,et al.  Delineation of forest/nonforest land use classes using nearest neighbor methods , 2004 .

[17]  Hervé Le Men,et al.  Scale-Sets Image Analysis , 2005, International Journal of Computer Vision.

[18]  Azriel Rosenfeld,et al.  Scene Labeling by Relaxation Operations , 1976, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics.

[19]  M. Rosenblatt Remarks on Some Nonparametric Estimates of a Density Function , 1956 .