Texture analysis and data fusion in the extraction of topographic objects from satellite imagery

This paper examines the influence of multisensor data fusion on the automatic extraction of topographic objects from SPOT panchromatic imagery. The suitability of various grey level co-occurrence based texture measures, as well as different pixel windows is also investigated. It is observed that best results are obtained with a 3 2 3 pixel window and the texture measure homogeneity. The synthetic texture image derived together with a Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) imagery are then fused to the SPOT data using the additional channel concept. The object feature base is expanded to include both spectral and spatial features. A maximum likelihood classification approach is then applied. It is demonstrated that the segmentation of topographic objects is significantly improved by fusing the multispectral and texture information.