Identification of multi-scale corresponding object-set pairs between two polygon datasets with hierarchical co-clustering

In this paper, we propose a means of finding multi-scale corresponding object-set pairs between two polygon datasets by means of hierarchical co-clustering. This method converts the intersection-ratio-based similarities of two objects from two datasets, one from each dataset, into the objects’ proximity in a geometric space using a Laplacian-graph embedding technique. In this space, the method finds hierarchical object clusters by means of agglomerative hierarchical clustering and separates each cluster into object-set pairs according to the datasets to which the objects belong. These pairs are evaluated with a matching criterion to find geometrically corresponding object-set pairs. We applied the proposed method to the segmentation result of a composite image with 6 NDVI images and a forest inventory map. Regardless of the different origins of the datasets, the proposed method can find geometrically corresponding object-set pairs which represent hierarchical distinctive forest areas.