The use of morphological profiles in classification of data from urban areas

Classification of panchromatic IKONOS data from an urban area in Reykjavik, Iceland is investigated. It is well known that conventional classification algorithms have difficulty classifying high resolution data from urban areas. Therefore, in the paper, an approach based on morphological preprocessing is applied. The approach is in two steps. First, the morphological composition of geodesic opening and closing operations of different sizes is used in order to build a morphological profile. Although the original panchromatic data is only of one data channel, the use of the composition operations gives additional data channels, which may contain redundancies. Therefore, in the second step, a neural classifier with pruning capabilities is used to reduce the number of data channels and classify the data. Several compositions of morphological opening and closing transforms where used to obtain a stack of data using differently sized structure elements.