With the increasing precision of recent spaceborne sensors, remotely sensed images have become exceedingly large. These images are being used more and more often in the preparation of emergency maps when a disaster occurs. Visual interpretation of these images is long and automatic pixel-based methods require a lot of memory, processing power and time. In this paper, we propose to use a fast level-set image transformation in order to obtain a hierarchical representation of image's objects. A scale profile is then extracted and included as a relevant feature for land-use classification in urban areas. The main contribution of this paper is the analysis of the scale profile for remote sensing applications. The data set from the earthquake that occurred on 12 January 2012 in Haiti is used.

Date Published: 29 May 2013
PDF: 9 pages
Proc. SPIE 8743, Algorithms and Technologies for Multispectral, Hyperspectral, and Ultraspectral Imagery XIX, 87431Z (29 May 2013); doi: 10.1117/12.2016291

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 8743:
Algorithms and Technologies for Multispectral, Hyperspectral, and Ultraspectral Imagery XIX
Sylvia S. Shen; Paul E. Lewis, Editor(s)