Knowledge-based region labeling for remote sensing image interpretation

The increasing availability of High Spatial Resolution (HSR) satellite images is an opportunity to characterize and identify urban objects. Thus, the augmentation of the precision led to a need of new image analysis methods using region-based (or object-based) approaches. In this field, an important challenge is the use of domain knowledge for automatic urban objects identification, and a major issue is the formalization and exploitation of this knowledge. In this paper, we present the building steps of a knowledge-base of urban objects allowing to perform the interpretation of HSR images in order to help urban planners to automatically map the territory. The knowledge-base is used to assign segmented regions (i.e. extracted from the images) into semantic objects (i.e. concepts of the knowledge-base). A matching process between the regions and the concepts of the knowledge-base is proposed, allowing to bridge the semantic gap between the images content and the interpretation. The method is validated on Quickbird images of the urban areas of Strasbourg and Marseille (France). The results highlight the capacity of the method to automatically identify urban objects using the domain knowledge. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.