A tiling procedure for second-order variational segmentation of large size remote sensing images

Typical tiling approaches to segmentation of large images perform separated runs of a specific segmentation algorithm on tiles and then merge the results. However, specific post-processing is often required to remove possible artifacts on tiles junctions. In this paper, we aim at showing that a simple tiling strategy with partially overlapping tiles can be applied to a 2-nd order variational segmentation method based on the minimization of the Blake-Zisserman functional, in such a way that tile boundaries are coherent without any need of specific post-processing. Moreover, the energy minimization is performed on each tile with Dirichlet initial boundary conditions; thus, tiles are independent and the whole procedure is parallelizable with independent tiles.