Improving texture description in remote sensing image multi-scale classification tasks by using visual words

Although texture features are important for region-based classification of remote sensing images, the literature shows that texture descriptors usually have poor performance when compared and combined with color descriptors. In this paper, we propose a bag-of-visual-words (BOW) “propagation” approach to extract texture features from a hierarchy of regions. This strategy improves efficacy of feature as it encodes texture information independently of the region shape. Experiments show that the proposed approach improves the classification results when compared with global descriptors using the bounding box padding strategy.