An Improved Hierarchical Segmentation Method for Remote Sensing Images

This paper presents an inversed quad tree merging method for hierarchical high-resolution remote sensing image segmentation, in which bottom-up approaches of region based merge techniques are chained. The image segmentation process is mainly composed of three sections: grouping pixels to form image object/region primitives in imagery using inversed quad tree, initializing neighbor list and region feature variables and then hierarchical clustering neighboring regions. This segmentation algorithm has been tested on the QuickBird images and been evaluated and it exhibits good efficiency over initialization of neighbor list for quad tree node/region primitives. This paper also provides a brief proof of the good efficiency of a sorted merge list which can be viewed as an alternative for dither matrix to randomly distribute region merging pairs which is adopted in e-Cognition.