Another look on region merging procedure from seed region shift for high-resolution remote sensing image segmentation

Region merging method is widely used for remote sensing image segmentation in Geographic Object-Based Image Analysis (GEOBIA) because of its simplicity and effectiveness. Instead of improving the merging strategy, similarity measure, and stopping rule for region merging method as usual, we aim at exploring the effectiveness of the seed region shift on region merging-based segmentation. Different region merging procedures with different seed region shift frequencies are compared by fixing other conditions, demonstrating that the shift of seed regions serves as one of the key impacts to segmentation accuracy for region merging method. If the seed regions keep fixed during region merging procedure, it will lead to uneven expansion of regions and consequently low segmentation accuracy. However, if the seed regions can be dynamically shifted during region merging procedure, it will lead to even expansion of regions and achieve similar segmentation performance for different region merging strategies. The findings could be beneficial to selecting or further improving image segmentation method for GEOBIA.