Using three-dimensional features to improve terrain classification

Abstract

Texture has long been regarded as spatial distributions of gray-level variation, and texture analysis has generally been confined to the 2-D image domain. Introducing the concept of "3-D world feature", this paper considers texture as a function of 3-D structures and proposes a set of "3-D textural features". The proposed 3-D features appear to have a great potential in terrain classification. Experiments have been carried out to compare the 3-D features with a popular traditional 2-D feature set. The results show that the 3-D features significantly outperform the 2-D features in terms of classification accuracy.