A cognitive pyramid for contextual classification of remote sensing images

Many cases of remote sensing classification present complicated patterns that cannot be identified on the basis of spectral data alone, but require contextual methods that base class discrimination on the spatial relationships between the individual pixel and local and global configurations of neighboring pixels. However, the use of contextual classification is still limited by critical issues, such as complexity and problem dependency. We propose here a contextual classification strategy for object recognition in remote sensing images in an attempt to solve recognition tasks operatively. The salient characteristics of the strategy are the definition of a multiresolution feature extraction procedure exploiting human perception and the use of soft neural classification based on the multilayer perceptron model. Three experiments were conducted to evaluate the performance of the methodology, one in an easily controlled domain using synthetic images, the other two in real domains involving builtup pattern recognition in panchromatic aerial photographs and high-resolution satellite images.