Multiresolution Supervised Classification of Panchromatic and Multispectral Images by Markov Random Fields and Graph Cuts

Abstract

The problem of supervised classification of multiresolution images, which are composed of a higher resolution panchromatic channel and of several coarser resolution multispectral channels, is addressed in this paper by proposing a novel contextual method based on Markov random fields. The method iteratively exploits a linear mixture model for the relationships between data at different resolutions and a graph cut approach to Markovian energy minimization to generate a contextual classification map at the highest resolution available in the input data set. The estimation of the parameters of the method is performed by extending recently proposed techniques based on the expectation-maximization and Ho-Kashyap's algorithms. The method is experimentally validated with semisimulated and real data involving both IKONOS and Landsat-7 ETM+ images, and the results are compared with those generated by previous approaches to the classification of multiresolution imagery.