Segmentation of high spatial resolution remote sensing images of mountainous areas based on the improved mean shift algorithm

Using conventional Mean Shift Algorithm to segment high spatial resolution Remote sensing images of mountainous areas usually leads to an unsatisfactory result, due to its rich texture information. In this paper, we propose an improved Mean Shift Algorithm in consideration of the characteristics of these images. First, images were classified into several homogeneous color regions and texture regions by conducting variance detection on the color space. Next, each homogeneous color region was directly segmented to generate the preliminary results by applying the Mean Shift Algorithm. For each texture region, we conduct a high-dimensional feature space by extracting information such as color, texture and shape comprehensively, and work out a proper bandwidth according to the normalized distribution density. Then the bandwidth variable Mean Shift Algorithm was applied to obtain segmentation results by conducting the pattern classification in feature space. Last, the final results were obtained by merging these regions by means of the constructed cost functions and removing the over-segmented regions from the merged regions. It has been experimentally segmented on the high spatial resolution remote sensing images collected by Quickbird and Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). We put forward an approach to evaluate the segmentation results by using the segmentation matching index (SMI). This takes into consideration both the area and the spectrum. The experimental results suggest that the improved Mean Shift Algorithm outperforms the conventional one in terms of accuracy of segmentation.