Detection of compound structures using multiple hierarchical segmentations

In this paper, our aim is to discover compound structures comprised of regions obtained from hierarchical segmentations of multiple spectral bands. A region adjacency graph is constructed by representing regions as vertices and connecting these vertices that are spatially close by edges. Then, dissimilarities between neighboring vertices are computed using statistical and structural features, and are assigned as edge weights. Finally, the compound structures are detected by extracting the connected components of the graph whose edges with relatively large weights are removed. Experiments using WorldView-2 images show that grouping of these vertices according to different criteria can extract high-level compound structures that cannot be obtained using traditional techniques. © 2012 IEEE.