'Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)'
Doi
Abstract
Earth observation (EO) has become a valuable source of comprehensive, reliable, and persistent
information for a wide number of applications. However, dealing with the complexity of land cover is
sometimes difficult, as the variety of EO sensors reflects in the multitude of details recorded in several types
of image data. Their properties dictate the category and nature of the perceptible land structures. The data
heterogeneity hampers proper understanding, preventing the definition of universal procedures for content
exploitation. The main shortcomings are due to the different human and sensor perception on objects, as well
as to the lack of coincidence between visual elements and similarities obtained by computation. In order to
bridge these sensory and semantic gaps, the paper presents a compound framework for EO image information
extraction. The proposed approach acts like a common ground between the user's understanding, who is
visually shortsighted to the visible domain, and the machines numerical interpretation of a much wider
information. A hierarchical data representation is considered. At first, basic elements are automatically
computed. Then, users can enforce their judgement on the data processing results until semantic structures
are revealed. This procedure completes a user-machine knowledge transfer. The interaction is formalized as
a dialogue, where communication is determined by a set of parameters guiding the computational process
at each level of representation. The purpose is to maintain the data-driven observable connected to the level
of semantics and to human awareness. The proposed concept offers flexibility and interoperability to users,
allowing them to generate those results that best fit their application scenario. The experiments performed on
different satellite images demonstrate the ability to increase the performances in case of semantic annotation
by adjusting a set of parameters to the particularities of the analyzed data
