Integrating segmentation and classification accuracy for accuracy assessment in object-based image analysis

An accuracy assessment method that integrates segmentation and classification accuracy is proposed to meet the requirements of object-based image analysis. Segmentation errors are measured by establishing the relationship between pixels and their corresponding segments according to the overlaps of segments and reference polygons. Then, two improved confusion matrices that take the segmentation errors into consideration are used: one for pixel-level classification results, and the other for object-level classification results. A final accuracy assessment combines the statistics of these two confusion matrices. The proposed method can be applied to segmentation scale selection in the hierarchical interpretation system. An experiment on a SPOT5 image demonstrates the effectiveness of this method for segmentation scale selection, which can guide the fusion of objects of different scales to obtain a higher accuracy.