Selection of Optimal Object Features in Object-Based Image Analysis Using Filter-Based Algorithms

With the increase in spatial resolution of recent sensors, object-based image analysis (OBIA) has gained importance for producing detailed land use maps. One of the main advantages of OBIA is that a variety of spectral, spatial and textural features can be extracted for the segmented image objects that are later utilized in classification. However, using a large number of features not only increases the required computational time, but also requires a large number of ground samples, which is unavailable in most cases. For these reasons, feature selection (FS) has become an important research topic for OBIA based classification studies. In this study, three filter-based FS algorithms namely, Chi square, information gain and ReliefF were applied to determine the most effective object features that ensure high separability among landscape features. For this purpose, importance degree (i.e. ranks) of 110 input object features were firstly estimated by the algorithms, and correlation-based merit function was then applied to determine optimum feature subset size. Multi-resolution segmentation algorithm was applied for segmenting a WorldView-2 image. Support vector machine, random forest and nearest neighbour classifiers were all utilized to classify segmented image objects using the selected object features. Results revealed that the FS algorithms were effective for selecting the most relevant features. Also, the classifiers produced the highest performances with 24 out of 110 features selected by the information gain (IG) algorithm. Particularly, the support vector machine classifier produced the highest overall accuracy (92.00%) with 24 selected features determined by the IG algorithm. A significant improvement of about 4% was achieved by applying FS procedures that was found statistically significant in terms of Wilcoxon signed-ranks test.