Compressed histogram attribute profiles for the classification of VHR remote sensing images

This paper presents a novel compressed histogram attribute profile (CHAP) for classification of very high resolution remote sensing images. The CHAP characterizes the marginal local distribution of attribute filter responses to model the texture information of each sample with a small number of image features. This is achieved based on a three steps algorithm. The first step is devoted to provide a complete characterization of spatial properties of objects in a scene. To this end, the attribute profile (AP) is initially built by the sequential application of attribute filters to the considered image. Then, to capture complete spatial characteristics of the structures in the scene a local histogram is calculated for each sample of each image in the AP. The local histograms of the same pixel location can contain redundant information since: i) adjacent histogram bins can provide similar information; and ii) the attributes obtained with similar attribute filter threshold values lead to re...