AN ADAPTIVE MORPHOLOGICAL MEAN FILTER FOR VERY HIGH-RESOLUTION REMOTE SENSING IMAGE PROCESSING

Abstract. Very high resolution (VHR) remote sensing imagery can reveal the ground object in greater detail, depicting their color, shape, size and structure. However, VHR also leads much original noise in spectra, and this original noise may reduce the reliability of the classification’s result. This paper presents an Adaptive Morphological Mean Filter (AMMF) for smoothing the original noise of VHR imagery and improving the classification’s performance. AMMF is a shape-adaptive filter which is constructed by detecting gradually the spectral similarity between a kernel-anchored pixel and its contextual pixels through an extension-detector with 8-neighbouring pixels, and the spectral value of the kernel-anchored pixel is instead by the mean of group pixels within the adaptive region. The classification maps based on the AMMF are compared with the classification of VHR images based on the homologous filter processing, such as Mean Filter (MF) and Median Filter(MedF). The experimental results suggest the following: 1) VHR image processed using AMMF can not only preserve the detail information among inter-classes but also smooth the noise within intra-class; 2) The proposed AMMF processing can improve the classification’s performance of VHR image, and it obtains a better visual performance and accuracy while comparing with MF and MedF.