A marker-based approach for the automated selection of a single segmentation from a hierarchical set of image segmentations

The Hierarchical SEGmentation (HSEG) algorithm, which combines region object finding with region object clustering, has given good performances for multi- and hyperspectral image analysis. This technique produces at its output a hierarchical set of image segmentations. The automated selection of a single segmentation level is often necessary. We propose and investigate the use of automatically selected \textit{markers} for this purpose. In this paper, a novel Marker-based HSEG (M-HSEG) method for spectral-spatial classification of hyperspectral images is proposed. Two classification-based approaches for automatic marker selection are adapted and compared for this purpose. Then, a novel constrained marker-based HSEG algorithm is applied, resulting in a spectral-spatial classification map. Three different implementations of the M-HSEG method are proposed and their performances in terms of classification accuracies are compared. The experimental results, presented for three hyperspectral airborne images, demonstrate that the proposed approach yields accurate segmentation and classification maps, and thus is attractive for remote sensing image analysis.