This paper introduces a new semi-automatic method to extract regions of interest (ROI) from aerial and satellite images. It uses a geometric active contour, which is based on level sets method, to segment and extract the interesting area which has complicated topological structures. A simple Mumford-Shah functional is defined as an energy function and the Gaussian PDF is adopted to represent the distribution of intensity. A specified polygon is used as both initiate data and the range in which contour evolve. We give some examples of ROI extraction on various aerial and satellite images. Experimental results show that our proposed method has strong capability to deal with the extraction of areas which has a complex topological structure.

Date Published: 28 October 2006
PDF: 6 pages
Proc. SPIE 6419, Geoinformatics 2006: Remotely Sensed Data and Information, 64191A (28 October 2006); doi: 10.1117/12.713158

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 6419:
Geoinformatics 2006: Remotely Sensed Data and Information
Liangpei Zhang; Xiaoling Chen, Editor(s)