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Counting craters is a paramount tool of planetary analysis because it provides relative dating of planetary surfaces. Dating surfaces with high spatial resolution requires counting a very large number of small, sub-kilometer size craters. Exhaustive manual surveys of such craters over extensive regions are impractical, sparking interest in designing crater detection algorithms (CDAs). As a part of our effort to design a CDA, which is robust and practical for planetary research analysis, we propose a crater detection approach that utilizes both shape and texture features to identify efficiently sub-kilometer craters in high resolution panchromatic images. First, a mathematical morphology-based shape analysis is used to identify regions in an image that may contain craters; only those regions – crater candidates – are the subject of further processing. Second, image texture features in combination with the boosting ensemble supervised learning algorithm are used to accurately classify previously identified candidates into craters and non-craters. The design of the proposed CDA is described and its performance is evaluated using a high resolution image of Mars for which sub-kilometer craters have been manually identified. The overall detection rate of the proposed CDA is 81%, the branching factor is 0.14, and the overall quality factor is 72%. This performance is a significant improvement over the previous CDA based exclusively on the shape features. The combination of performance level and computational efficiency offered by this CDA makes it attractive for practical application.

This paper discusses an approach for river mapping and flood evaluation based on multi-temporal time series analysis of satellite images utilizing pixel spectral information for image classification and region-based segmentation for extracting water-covered regions. Analysis of MODIS satellite images is applied in three stages: before flood, during flood and after flood. Water regions are extracted from the MODIS images using image classification (based on spectral information) and image segmentation (based on spatial information). Multi-temporal MODIS images from ``normal'' (non-flood) and flood time-periods are processed in two steps. In the first step, image classifiers such as Support Vector Machines (SVMs) and Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) separate the image pixels into water and non-water groups based on their spectral features. The classified image is then segmented using spatial features of the water pixels to remove the misclassified water. From the results obtained, we evaluate the performance of the method and conclude that the use of image classification (SVM and ANN) and region-based image segmentation is an accurate and reliable approach for the extraction of water-covered regions. (c) 2012 COSPAR. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

A statistical model is proposed for analysis of the texture of land cover types for global and regional land cover classification by using texture features extracted by multiresolution image analysis techniques. It consists of four novel indices representing second-order texture, which are calculated after wavelet decomposition of an image and after texture extraction by a new approach that makes use of a four-pixel texture unit. The model was applied to four satellite images of the Black Sea region, obtained by Terra/MODIS and Aqua/MODIS at different spatial resolution. In single texture classification experiments, we used 15 subimages (50 × 50 pixels) of the selected classes of land covers that are present in the satellite images studied. These subimages were subjected to one-level and two-level decompositions by using orthonormal spline and Gabor-like spline wavelets. The texture indices were calculated and used as feature vectors in the supervised classification system with neural networks. The testing of the model was based on the use of two kinds of widely accepted statistical texture quantities: five texture features determined by the co-occurrence matrix (angular second moment, contrast, correlation, inverse difference moment, entropy), and four statistical texture features determined after the wavelet transformation (mean, standard deviation, energy, entropy). The supervised neural network classification was performed and the discrimination ability of the proposed texture indices was found comparable with that for the sets of five GLCM texture features and four wavelet-based texture features. The results obtained from the neural network classifier showed that the proposed texture model yielded an accuracy of 92.86% on average after orthonormal wavelet decomposition and 100% after Gabor-like wavelet decomposition for texture classification of the examined land cover types on satellite images.