A DATA FIELD METHOD FOR URBAN REMOTELY SENSED IMAGERY CLASSIFICATION CONSIDERING SPATIAL CORRELATION

Abstract. Spatial correlation between pixels is important information for remotely sensed imagery classification. Data field method and spatial autocorrelation statistics have been utilized to describe and model spatial information of local pixels. The original data field method can represent the spatial interactions of neighbourhood pixels effectively. However, its focus on measuring the grey level change between the central pixel and the neighbourhood pixels results in exaggerating the contribution of the central pixel to the whole local window. Besides, Geary’s C has also been proven to well characterise and qualify the spatial correlation between each pixel and its neighbourhood pixels. But the extracted object is badly delineated with the distracting salt-and-pepper effect of isolated misclassified pixels. To correct this defect, we introduce the data field method for filtering and noise limitation. Moreover, the original data field method is enhanced by considering each pixel in the window as the central pixel to compute statistical characteristics between it and its neighbourhood pixels. The last step employs a support vector machine (SVM) for the classification of multi-features (e.g. the spectral feature and spatial correlation feature). In order to validate the effectiveness of the developed method, experiments are conducted on different remotely sensed images containing multiple complex object classes inside. The results show that the developed method outperforms the traditional method in terms of classification accuracies.