Geography and Natural Resources

SEGMENTATION QUALITY ASSESSMENT FOR VARYING SPATIAL RESOLUTIONS OF VERY HIGH RESOLUTION SATELLITE IMAGERY

T.Kavzoglu, H.Tonbul

Gebze Technical University, Engineering Faculty, Department of Geomatics Engineering,

41400, Kocaeli, Turkey

[email protected]

Abstract. Due to the complex nature of remotely sensed imagery, it is difficult to construct meaningful image objects by segmenting a landscape features in an image. Because many factors including parameter selection, band weights, spectral resolution, spatial resolution and textural information affect the quality of the segments to be produced, a comprehensive analysis is required to assure high quality image objects. In this study, the influence of the spatial resolution on segmentation quality was analysed using Worldview-2 satellite image at five different spatial resolutions (0.5, 2, 4, 8, 16 meters). The multiresolution segmentation algorithm, the most widely used method and available in eCognition software, was utilized for the segmentation processes in this study. The ef­fect of spatial resolution on the segmentation quality was investigated on three specific land use/cover types namely, building, pasture and road by using quality measures of shape index, area fit index and quality rate. It has been observed that resampling the image from 0.5 to 2, 4, 8, 16 meters remarkably reduced the quality of the segmentation results. For instance, when increasing the spatial resolution from 8 to 16 meters, the quality rate decreased by about 77% for road class. The results of this study revealed that the use of 4 meters or higher resolutions (i.e. 0.5 and 2 meters) would produce acceptable results in terms of segmentation quality metrics. When the lower re­so­lution is preferred, the quality of the segments decreases considerably, thus the created image objects become too coarse, indicating an increase in under-segmentation.

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