Textural classification of remotely sensed images using multiresolution techniques

Multiresolution analysis (MRA) methods have been successfully used in texture analysis. Texture analysis is widely discussed in literature, but most of the methods which do not employ multiresolution strategy cannot exploit the fact that texture occurs at various spatial scales. This paper proposes a methodology to identify different classes in satellite images using texture features from newly developed multiresolution methods. The proposed method is tested on remotely sensed optical images and a Pauli RGB decomposed version of synthetic aperture radar image. The textural information is extracted at various scales and in different directions from curvelet and contourlet transforms. The results are compared with wavelet-based features. Accuracy assessment is performed and comparative analysis is carried out using minimum distance to mean, support vector machine and random forest classifiers. It is found that the proposed method shows better class discriminating power and classification capability as compared to existing wavelet-based method.