Region-Growing Techniques Based on Texture for Provincing the Ocean Floor

Categorization of areas of the ocean floor is referred to as provincing. Identification of these provinces is needed for military tasks, geological studies, environmental studies etc. Side scan sonar provides a mechanism to obtain gray scale images of the ocean floor. Automated processing of these images to find interesting textural features may be accomplished by computing cooccurrence matrices of groups of adjacent pixels and computing textual features from these matrices. The grouping of pixels may be done using fixed size rectangular texels or by building irregular shaped regions from small groups of pixels. A comparison of the two methods applied to sonar images has shown that the region growing approach is successful at identifying sand waves in irregular shaped regions. 1. Introduction Provincing the ocean floor is an ongoing process. Side-scan sonar can be used to collect gray scale images of the ocean floor. These images are then processed manually by trained geologists, and..