STRUCTURAL DESCRIPTION OF A LANDSAT-TM-SCENE FOR IMPROVED REGION-BASED CLASSIFICATION.

To overcome the difficulties arising from the rather low signal to noise ratio and the poor dynamic range of video-values within each spectral band a new multispectral edge-preserving smoothing algorithm has been developed. A gradient-based segmentation partitions the smoothed image into homogeneous regions by grouping neighboring pixels with similar spectral properties, the basic intrinsic characteristics of which are collected in a property table. This structural description of the image serves as a starting point for a subsequent knowledge-based interpretation in terms of land-use categories.