Morphological operators for segmentation of high contrast textured regions in remotely sensed imagery

We develop a transformation based on morphological filters that measures the contrast of image texture. This transformation is proportional to texture contrast, but insensitive to its specific type. Though the transformation provides a high response in textured areas, it suppresses individual high contrast features that stand apart from textured areas. It can serve as an effective texture descriptor for unsupervised or supervised segmentation of textured regions, provides high accuracy of localization and does not involve heavy computations. The method is robust to variations of illumination and works on different types of images without needing to be tuned. The only parameter is a scale related parameter. We illustrate the use of the proposed method on satellite and aerial images.