Marker-Controlled Watershed-Based Segmentation of Multiresolution Remote Sensing Images

A new technique for the segmentation of single- and multiresolution (MR) remote sensing images is proposed. To guarantee the preservation of details at fine scales, edge-based watershed is used, with automatically generated markers that help in limiting oversegmentation. For MR images, the panchromatic and multispectral components are processed independently, extracting both the edge maps and the morphological and spectral markers that are eventually fused at the highest resolution, thus avoiding any information loss induced by pansharpening. Numerical results on object layer extraction and simple classification tasks prove the proposed techniques to provide accurate segmentation maps, which preserve fine details and, contrary to state-of-the-art products, can single out objects equally well at very different scales.