SATELLITE IMAGE SEGMENTATION: A NOVEL ADAPTIVE MEAN-SHIFT CLUSTERING BASED APPROACH

Segmentation of satellite images using a novel adaptive non parametric mean-shift clustering algorithm is proposed in this paper. Image segmentation refers to the process of splitting up an image into its constituent objects. It is also an important step in bridging the semantic gap between low level image interpretation and high level visual analysis. Mean-shift technique is based on the concept of kernel density estimation. It has been applied successfully in diverse vision related tasks including segmentation. The performance of the mean shift algorithm is greatly affected by the size of the parzen window and the terminating criteria. These two issues have been taken care of here in a purely statistical framework. The efficiency of this newly developed adaptive clustering has been judged for segmentation of any initially oversegmented satellite image. The notion of object based image analysis is preserved by initially over segmenting the image by watershed technique. Extensive experiments on several multispectral satellite images have confirmed the effectivity of this proposed approach in comparison to some widely used state of the art segmentation methods.