A GEOSTATISTIC BASED SEGMENTATION APPROACH FOR REMOTELY SENSED IMAGES

As to many conventional segmentation approaches , spatial autocorrelation, perhaps being the first law of geography, is always overlooked. Thus, the corresponding segmentation results are always not so satisfying, which will further affect the subsequent image processing or analyses. In order to improve segmentation results, a geostatistic based segmentation approach with the consideration of spatial autocorrelation hidden in remote-sensing images is proposed in this article. First, by calculating the mean variance between each pair of pixels at given different lag distances, information like the size of typical targets in the scene can be obtained, and segmentation thresholds are calculated accordingly. Second, an initial region growing segmentation approach is implemented. Finally, based on the segmentation thresholds obtained at the first step and the initial segmentation results, the final segmentation results are obtained using the same region growing approach by taking the local mutual best fitting strategy. From the experiment results, we found the approach is rather promising. However, there still exists some problems to be settled, and further researches should be conducted in the future.