Detecting man-made structures and changes in satellite imagery with a content-based information retrieval system built on self-organizing maps

Matthieu Molinier*, Jorma Laaksonen, Tuomas Häme

*Corresponding author for this work

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticleScientificpeer-review

    49 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    The increasing amount and resolution of satellite sensors demand new techniques for browsing remote sensing image archives. Content-based querying allows an efficient retrieval of images based on the information they contain, rather than their acquisition date or geographical extent. Self-organizing maps (SOMs) have been successfully applied in the PicSOM system to content-based image retrieval in databases of conventional images. In this paper, we investigate and extend the potential of PicSOM for the analysis of remote sensing data. We propose methods for detecting man-made structures, as well as supervised and unsupervised change detection, based on the same framework. In this paper, a database was artificially created by splitting each satellite image to be analyzed into small images. After training the PicSOM on this imagelet database, both interactive and off-line queries were made to detect man-made structures, as well as changes between two very high resolution images from different years. Experimental results were both evaluated quantitatively and discussed qualitatively, and suggest that this new approach is suitable for analyzing very high resolution optical satellite imagery. Possible applications of this work include interactive detection of man-made structures or supervised monitoring of sensitive sites.

    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)861-874
    JournalIEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing
    Volume45
    Issue number4
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 1 Apr 2007
    MoE publication typeA1 Journal article-refereed

    Funding

    Manuscript received March 18, 2006; revised July 25, 2006. This work was supported in part by the Academy of Finland and in part by the National Technology Agency of Finland (TEKES). M. Molinier and T. Häme are with the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, 02044 Espoo, Finland (e-mail: [email protected]). J. Laaksonen is with the Helsinki University of Technology, 02015 Espoo, Finland (e-mail: [email protected]). Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TGRS.2006.890580

    Keywords

    • Change detection
    • Content-based information retrieval
    • High-resolution optical satellite images
    • Man-made structure detection
    • Self-organizing maps (SOMs)

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