A theoretical and experimental investigation of graph theoretical measures for land development in satellite imagery

Today\´s commercial satellite images enable experts to classify region types in great detail. In previous work, we considered discriminating rural and urban regions. However, a more detailed classification is required for many purposes. These fine classifications assist government agencies in many ways including urban planning, transportation management, and rescue operations. In a step toward the automation of the fine classification process, this paper explores graph theoretical measures over grayscale images. The graphs are constructed by assigning photometric straight-line segments to vertices, while graph edges encode their spatial relationships. We then introduce a set of measures based on various properties of the graph. These measures are nearly monotonic (positively correlated) with increasing structure (organization) in the image. Thus, increased cultural activity and land development are indicated by increases in these measures - without explicit extraction of road networks, buildings, residences, etc. These latter, time consuming (and still only partially automated) tasks can be restricted only to "promising" image regions, according to our measures. In some applications our measures may suffice. We present a theoretical basis for the measures followed by extensive experimental results in which the measures are first compared to manual evaluations of land development. We then present and test a method to focus on, and (pre)extract, suburban-style residential areas. These are of particular importance in many applications, and are especially difficult to extract. In this work, we consider commercial IKONOS data. These images are orthorectified to provide a fixed resolution of 1 meter per pixel on the ground. They are, therefore, metric in the sense that ground distance is fixed in scale to pixel distance. Our data set is large and diverse, including sea and coastline, rural, forest, residential, industrial, and urban areas.