Adaptive Parametric Estimation and Classification of Remotely Sensed Imagery Using a Pyramid Structure

An unsupervised region based image segmentation algorithm implemented with a pyramid structure has been developed. Rather than depending on thraditional local splitting and merging of regions with a similarity test of region statistics, the algorithm identifies the homogenous and boundary regions at each level of pyramid, then the global parameters of esch class are estimated and updated with values of the homogenous regions represented at the level of the pyramid using the mixture distribution estimation. The image is then classified through the pyramid structure. Classification results obtained for both simulated and SPOT imagery are presented.