Segmentation for remote-sensing imagery using the object-based Gaussian-Markov random field model with region coefficients

The Markov random field (MRF) model is a widely used method for remote-sensing image segmentation, especially the object-based MRF (OMRF) method has attracted great attention in recent years. However, the OMRF method usually fails to capture the correlation between regional features by just considering the mixed-Gaussian model. In order to solve this problem and improve the segmentation accuracy, this article proposes a new method, object-based Gaussian-Markov random field model with region coefficients (OGMRF-RC), for remote-sensing image segmentation. First, to describe the complicated interactions among regional features, the OGMRF-RC method employs the region size and edge information as region coefficients to build the object-based linear regression equation (OLRE) for each region. Second, the classic Gaussian-Markov model is extended to region level for modelling the errors in OLREs. Finally, the segmentation is achieved through a principled probabilistic inference designed for the OGMRF-RC method. Experimental results over synthetic texture images and remote-sensing images from different datasets show that the proposed OGMRF-RC method can achieve more accurate segmentation than other state-of-the-art MRF-based methods and the method using convolutional neural networks.