A fast and effective method for unsupervised segmentation evaluation of remote sensing images

Abstract

The segmentation of remote sensing images with high spatial resolution is important and fundamental in geographic object-based image analysis (GEOBIA), so evaluating segmentation results without prior knowledge is an essential part in segmentation algorithms comparison, segmentation parameters selection, and optimization. In this study, we proposed a fast and effective unsupervised evaluation (UE) method using the area-weighted variance (WV) as intra-segment homogeneity and the difference to neighbor pixels (DTNP) as inter-segment heterogeneity. Then these two measures were combined into a fast-global score (FGS) to evaluate the segmentation. The effectiveness of DTNP and FGS was demonstrated by visual interpretation as qualitative analysis and supervised evaluation (SE) as quantitative analysis. For this experiment, the "Multi-resolution Segmentation" algorithm in eCognition was adopted in the segmentation and four typical study areas of GF-2 images were used as test data. The effectiveness analysis of DTNP shows that it can keep stability and remain sensitive to both over-segmentation and under-segmentation compared to two existing inter-segment heterogeneity measures. The effectiveness and computational cost analysis of FGS compared with two existing UE methods revealed that FGS can effectively evaluate segmentation results with the lowest computational cost.