Interpretation of high-resolution optical imagery with evidential fusion of spectral information and object attributes

Since the past five years Lockheed Martin Canada is developing an advanced image interpretation system integrating classification tools and target detection operators for multispectral, hyperspectral and polarimetric SAR imagery. Improved classification maps and superior object detection and identification performances have been obtained with a pixel-driven evidential fusion of textural measurements and end-member respectively extracted from polSAR and HIS imagery. As in many applications objects to be extracted occupy several pixels in the image, the objective of current developments is to supplement the pixel-based fusion already performed with radiometric, textural, spectral features by adding specific object topological attributes (shape, size) and contextual description (spatial relationships). This paper presents a description of the new primitives and the results obtained on Ikonos imagery