Unsupervised Image Classification for Large Remotely-sensed Imagery using Regiongrowing Segmentation

A multistage hierarchical clustering technique, which is an unsupervised technique, was suggested in this paper for classifying large remotely-sensed imagery. The multistage algorithm consists of two stages. The local segmentor of the first stage performs regiongrowing segmentation by employing the hierarchical clustering procedure of CN-chain with the restriction that pixels in a cluster must be spatially contiguous. This stage uses a sliding window strategy with boundary blocking to alleviate a computational problem in computer memory for an enormous data. The global segmentor of the second stage has not spatial constraints for merging to classify the segments resulting from the previous stage. The experimental results show that the new approach proposed in this study efficiently performs the segmentation for the images of very large size and an extensive number of bands