Hierarchical Analysis of Remote Sensing Data: Morphological Attribute Profiles and Binary Partition Trees

The new generation of very high resolution sensors in airborne or satellite remote sensing open the door to countless new applications with a high societal impact. In order to bridge the gap between the potential offered by these new sensors and the needs of the end-users to actually face tomorrow’s challenges, advanced image processing methods need to be designed. In this paper we discuss two of the most promising strategies aiming at a hierarchical description and analysis of remote sensing data, namely the Extended Attribute Profiles (EAP) and the Binary Partition Trees (BPT). The EAP computes for each pixel a vector of attributes providing a local multiscale representation of the information and hence leading to a fine description of the local structures of the image. Using different attributes allows to address different contexts or applications. The BPTs provide a complete hierarchical description of the image, from the pixels (the leaves) to larger regions as the merging process goes on. The pruning of the tree provides a partition of the image and can address various goals (segmentation, object extraction, classification). The EAP and BPT approaches are used in experiments and the obtained results demonstrate their importance.