A Generalized Image Scene Decomposition-Based System for Supervised Classification of Very High Resolution Remote Sensing Imagery

Abstract

Very high resolution (VHR) remote sensing images are widely used for land cover classification. However, to the best of our knowledge, few approaches have been shown to improve classification accuracies through image scene decomposition. In this paper, a simple yet powerful observational scene scale decomposition (OSSD)-based system is proposed for the classification of VHR images. Different from the traditional methods, the OSSD-based system aims to improve the classification performance by decomposing the complexity of an image’s content. First, an image scene is divided into sub-image blocks through segmentation to decompose the image content. Subsequently, each sub-image block is classified respectively, or each block is processed firstly through an image filter or spectral–spatial feature extraction method, and then each processed segment is taken as the feature input of a classifier. Finally, classified sub-maps are fused together for accuracy evaluation. The effectiveness of our proposed approach was investigated through experiments performed on different images with different supervised classifiers, namely, support vector machine, k-nearest neighbor, naive Bayes classifier, and maximum likelihood classifier. Compared with the accuracy achieved without OSSD processing, the accuracy of each classifier improved significantly, and our proposed approach shows outstanding performance in terms of classification accuracy.