Abstract
This study proposed a modified anisotropic diffusion restoration for image classification. The anisotropic diffusion restoration uses a probabilistic model based on Markov random field, which represents geographical connectedness existing in many remotely sensed images, and restores them through an iterative diffusion processing. In every iteration, the bonding-strength coefficient associated with the spatial connectedness is adaptively estimated as a function of brightness gradient. The gradient function involves a constant called "temperature", which determines the amount of discontinuity and is continuously decreased in the iterations. In this study, the proposed method has been extensively evaluated using simulated images that were generated from various patterns. These patterns represent the types of natural and artificial land-use. The simulated images were restored by the modified anisotropic diffusion technique, and then classified by a multistage hierarchical clustering classification. The classification results were compared to them of the non-restored simulation images. The restoration with an appropriate temperature considerably reduces error in classification, especially for noisy images. This study made experiments on the satellite images remotely sensed on the Korean peninsula. The experimental results show that the proposed approach is also very effective on image classification in remote sensing.