A bag-of-visual words approach based on optimal segmentation scale for high resolution remote sensing image classification

High resolution remote sensing imagery can provide more useful information, such as spectral, shape and texture information. However, traditional pixel-based image classification approaches may suffer the increase of within-class spectral variation with improved spatial resolution. This paper presents a novel method which combines the optimal segmentation scale with Bag-of-Visual Words (BOV) representation for object-oriented classification. More precisely, an improved estimation of scale parameter (ESP) tool is adopted to determine the optimal parameters in multi-scale image segmentation. BOV is introduced to construct the midlevel representations instead of low-level features for object description. Then Support vector machine (SVM) is used for classification. And the experiments are conducted on high spatial resolution images to validate the proposed algorithm.