A Structured Approach To Segmentation Of Aerial Photographs
Jan‐Olof Eklundh · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1983
The problem of segmenting aerial photographs can generally not be solved in a reasonable manner by use of the information in the image alone. In this paper we present a structured approach to the problem, which in addition to the image uses simple and explicit knowledge about the geometry of objects and their spatial relations. The method is relaxationlike: it works with hypotheses which are given weights and iterates to a sclution. The incorporation of evidence of a hypotheses is, however, explicit and uses no complex compatibilities. The approach contains three processing levels: At the lowest level, hypotheses are formed about the material type of a pixel based on intensity and variation of intensity. At the intermediate level these hypotheses are refined into region hypotheses by use of size and shape constraints. This level is also working on pixel labels. One of the main problems is that certain regions are highly nonuniform with respect to the low-level features. Nonetheless they are welldefined by neigh-boring homogeneous regions. At the highest level region labels are considered. Region hypotheses are refined on the basis of relations between regions. At the present stage the method is not used for complete segmentation. Instead, it is a step to find regions that can be matched with a map. Experimental results exist mainly for the two highest levels.