Retrieval using texture features in high resolution multi-spectral satellite imagery

Texture features have long been used in remote sensing applications to represent and retrieve image regions similar to a query region. Various representations of texture have been proposed based on the Fourier power spectrum, spatial co-occurrence, wavelets, Gabor filters, etc. These representations vary in their computational complexity and their suitability for representing different region types. Much of the work done thus far has focused on panchromatic imagery at low to moderate spatial resolutions, such as images from Landsat 1-7 which have a resolution of 15-30 m/pixel, and from SPOT 1-5 which have a resolution of 2.5-20 m/pixel. However, it is not clear which texture representation works best for the new classes of high resolution panchromatic (60-100 cm/pixel) and multi-spectral (4 bands for red, green, blue, and near infra-red at 2.4-4 m/pixel) imagery. It is also not clear how the different spectral bands should be combined. In this paper, we investigate the retrieval performance of several different texture representations using multi-spectral satellite images from IKONOS. A query-by-example framework, along with a manually chosen ground truth dataset, allows different combinations of texture representations and spectral bands to be compared. We focus on the specific problem of retrieving inhabited regions from images of urban and rural scenes. Preliminary results show that 1) the use of all spectral bands improves the retrieval performance, and 2) co-occurrence, wavelet and Gabor texture features perform comparably.