Morphological attribute filters for the analysis of very high resolution remote sensing images

This paper proposes the use of morphological attribute profiles as an effective alternative to the conventional morphological operators based on the geodesic reconstruction for modeling the spatial information in very high resolution images. Attribute profiles, used in multilevel approaches, result particularly effective in terms of computational complexity and capabilities in characterizing the objects in the image. In addition they are more flexible than operators by reconstruction, thanks to the definition of possible different attributes. Experimental results obtained on a Quickbird panchromatic very high resolution image proved the effectiveness of the presented attribute filters and pointed out their main properties.