ISPRS Annals of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences
Download
Publications Copernicus
Download
Citation
Articles | Volume II-3/W1
https://doi.org/10.5194/isprsannals-II-3-W1-35-2013
https://doi.org/10.5194/isprsannals-II-3-W1-35-2013
16 May 2013
 | 16 May 2013

BEYOND HAND-CRAFTED FEATURES IN REMOTE SENSING

P. Tokarczyk, J. D. Wegner, S. Walk, and K. Schindler

Keywords: Classification, land cover, feature extraction, pattern recognition

Abstract. A basic problem of image classification in remote sensing is to select suitable image features. However, modern classifiers such as AdaBoost allow for feature selection driven by the training data. This capability brings up the question whether hand-crafted features are required or whether it would not be enough to extract the same quasi-exhaustive feature set for different classification problems and let the classifier choose a suitable subset for the specific image statistics of the given problem. To be able to efficiently extract a large quasi-exhaustive set of multi-scale texture and intensity features we suggest to approximate standard derivative filters via integral images. We compare our quasi-exhaustive features to several standard feature sets on four very high-resolution (VHR) aerial and satellite datasets of urban areas. We show that in combination with a boosting classifier the proposed quasi-exhaustive features outperform standard baselines.