Analysis of hierarchically related image segmentations

Describes an approach for producing high quality hierarchically related image segmentations and some first steps towards exploiting the information content of the segmentation hierarchy. Hierarchically related image segmentations are a set of image segmentations at different levels of detail in which the less detailed segmentations can be produced from specific merges of regions contained in the more detailed segmentations. After a general overview of other approaches to image segmentation, the Hierarchical Segmentation (HSEG) algorithm is presented, along with its recursive formulation (RHSEG). Finally, an approach is outlined for exploiting the information content from the segmentation hierarchy based on changes in region features from one hierarchical level to the next. Comparative results are presented with Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) data.