Fast GLCM and Gabor Filters for Texture Classification of Very High Resolution Remote Sensing Images

In the present research we have used gray level co-occurrence matrices (GLCM) and Gabor filters to extract texture features in order to classify satellite images. The main drawback of GLCM algorithm is its time-consuming nature. In this work, we proposed a fast GLCM algorithm to overcome the mentioned weakness of the traditional GLCM. The fast GLCM is capable of extracting approximately the same features as the traditional GLCM does, but in much less time (about 200 times faster). The other weakness of the traditional GLCM is its lower accuracy in the regions near the class borders. Since features extracted using Gabor filters are more accurate in boundary regions, we combined Gabor features with GLCM features. In this way we could compensate the latter mentioned weakness of GLCM. Experimental results show good capabilities of the proposed fast GLCM and the feature fusion method in classification of very high resolution remote sensing images.