Unsupervised satellite image segmentation using a Bivariate Beta type-II mixture model

This paper presents an unsupervised satellite color image segmentation approach based on Bivariate Beta type-II. Such a method could be considered as original since it uses a K-Means clustering algorithm in order to initialize the image class number. Moreover, it exploits a Bivariate Beta type-II for statistical distributions applying it for each class. Satellite image exploitation requires the use of different approaches, especially those based on the unsupervised statistical segmentation principle. Such approaches necessitate the definition of several parameters such as image class number, class variables estimation and mixture distributions. The use of statistical image attributes has allowed us to get convincing results, provided that we ensure under the condition of having an initialization step with appropriate statistical distributions. Bivariate Beta type-II associated with a K-means clustering algorithm and Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm could be adapted to such a problem. For each image class, Bivariate Beta type-II attributes a specific distribution type according to different parameters. Different adapted algorithms (namely K-Means clustering algorithm, EM algorithm and Bivariate Beta type-II algorithm) are then applied to the satellite image segmentation problem. The efficiency of those combined algorithms is validated with the Mean Squared Errors (MSE), Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) and Maximum Distance (MD).