A Web-Based System for Classification of Remote Sensing Data

Abstract

The availability of satellite imagery has expanded over the past few years, and the possibility to perform fast processing of massive databases comprising this kind of imagery data has opened ground-breaking perspectives in many different fields. This paper describes a web-based system (available online: http://hypergim.ceta-ciemat.es), which allows an inexperienced user to perform unsupervised classification of satellite/airborne images. The processing chain adopted in this work has been implemented in C language and integrated in our proposed tool, developed with HTML5, JavaScript, Php, AJAX and other web programming languages. Image acquisition with the applications programmer interface (API) is fast and efficient. An important added functionality of the developed tool is its capacity to exploit a remote server to speed up the processing of large satellite/airborne images at different zoom levels. The ability to process images at different zoom levels allows the tool an improved interaction with the user, who is able to supervise the final result. The previous functionalities are necessary to use efficient techniques for the classification of images and the incorporation of content-based image retrieval (CBIR). Several experimental validation types of the classification results with the proposed system are performed by comparing the classification accuracy of the proposed chain by means of techniques available in the well-known Environment for Visualizing Images (ENVI) software package.