Applicability of Geo-spatial Processing Open Sources to Geographic Object-based Image Analysis (GEOBIA)

Abstract

At present, GEOBIA (Geographic Object-based Image Analysis), heir of OBIA (Object-based Image Analysis), is regarded as an important methodology by object-oriented paradigm for remote sensing, dealing with geo-objects related to image segmentation and classification in the different view point of pixel-based processing. This also helps to directly link to GIS applications. Thus, GEOBIA software is on the booming. The main theme of this study is to look into the applicability of geo-spatial processing open source to GEOBIA. However, there is no few fully featured open source for GEOBIA which needs complicated schemes and algorithms, till It was carried out to implement a preliminary system for GEOBIA running an integrated and user-oriented environment. This work was performed by using various open sources such as OTB or PostgreSQL/PostGIS. Some points are different from the widely-used proprietary GEOBIA software. In this system, geo-objects are not file-based ones, but tightly linked with GIS layers in spatial database management system. The mean shift algorithm with parameters associated with spatial similarities or homogeneities is used for image segmentation. For classification process in this work, tree-based model of hierarchical network composing parent and child nodes is implemented by attribute join in the semi-automatic mode, unlike traditional image-based classification. Of course, this integrated GEOBIA system is on the progressing stage, and further works are necessary. It is expected that this approach helps to develop and to extend new applications such as urban mapping or change detection linked to GIS data sets using GEOBIA.