Segmentation of high-resolution multispectral image based on extended morphological profiles

High-resolution multispectral remote sensing image provides both spectral and structural information about land cover/land use types. In segmentation of such complex image scenes with obvious texture, the efficient image segmentation is required. In this study, a method for high resolution image segmentation based on the extended morphological profiles is proposed. First, fundamental morphological vector operations (erosion and dilation) are defined by the extension, taking into account the spatial and spectral information in simultaneous fashion. Theoretical definitions of extended morphological operations are used in the formal definition of the concept of extended morphological profiles, which is constructed based on the repeated use of openings and closings by reconstruction with a structuring element (SE) of increasing size. Then, the morphological multiscale characteristic (MMC) of each pixel is gained through the derivative of the extended morphological profiles (DEMP). A modified method was proposed to obtain the right morphological characteristics of the pixel, which will be used for the final segmentation results. Finally, a simple region merging method based on the distance between two centroids of the neighboring regions was adopted to further improve the segmentation result. The proposed approach is applied to high- resolution QuickBird multispectral images from urban, agricultural and forest areas for evaluation and comparison with existing methods, in terms of qualitative visual inspection and quantitative criteria. The proposed method demonstrated better performance than the classical morphological segmentation approaches.