Local Edge Distributions for Detection of Salient Structure Textures and Objects

Automatic detection of regions of salient texture and objects is useful for analysis of remotely sensed imagery, such as for land cover classification, object detection, and change detection. Intuitively, the local edges on an image indicate spectral discontinuity and the existence of structure texture or objects. This letter explores a simple method for measuring the saliency of texture and objects based on the edge density and spatial evenness of the edge distribution in the local window of each pixel. This method generates a saliency map by computing the saliency index of each pixel. By segmenting the saliency map, the salient structure texture regions and the locations of objects can be extracted. The algorithm requires only the window size as the input parameter and is relatively simple to implement. Experiments using high-resolution images show its effectiveness and accuracy in the detection of salient structure texture regions, such as crops and residential areas, and man-made objects, such as airplanes, cars, etc.