High-resolution remote sensing image segmentation based on improved RIU-LBP and SRM

In this paper, we propose an improved rotation invariant uniform local binary pattern (RIU-LBP) operator for segmenting high-resolution sensing image which can effectively describe the texture features of a high-resolution remote sensing image. The improved RIU-LBP is based on RIU-LBP. It introduces a threshold in binarization of region pixels. The new LBP operator can better tolerate small texture variation and better distinguish the plain and rough texture than the original RIU-LBP does. Then, a merging criterion of texture regions is proposed, which is based on regional LBP value distribution and Bhattacharyya distance. Finally, the texture merging criterion and spectral merging criterion are combined in the statistical region merging (SRM)-based remote sensing image segmentation method to improve segmentation results, taking full advantage of rich spectral and texture information in high-resolution remote sensing images. This algorithm can be adjusted to the number of segmented regions, and experiments indicate better segmentation results than ENVI 5.0 and the SRM method.