Classification of VHR remote sensing images using local feature-based attribute profiles

The present paper introduces an extension of attribute profiles (APs) by extracting their local features. The so-called local feature-based attribute profiles (LFAPs) are expected to provide a better characterization of each APs' filtered pixel (i.e. APs' sample) within its neighborhood, hence better deal with local texture information from the image's content. In this work, LFAP is constructed by extracting some simple first-order statistical features of the local patch around each APs' sample such as mean, standard deviation, range, etc. Then, the final feature vector characterizing each image pixel is formed by combining all local features extracted from APs of that pixel. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed technique, supervised classification using Random Forest classifier is performed on the VHR panchromatic Reykjavik image. Experimental results show that LFAPs can considerably improve the classification accuracy of the standard APs and the recently proposed histogram-based APs.