Stochastic model utilizing spectral and spatial characteristics

In remote sensing, because of physical properties of targets, sensor pixels in spatial proximity to one another are class conditionally correlated. Our main objective is to exploit this spatial correlation. Therefore, a two-dimensional causal first order Markov model was used to extract the spatial and spectral information and, based upon it, new object classifiers with improved performance were developed. First, the minimum distance (MT) and the maximum likelihood (ML) object classifiers are discussed. Then, based on the proposed model, these two classifiers are modified, and a linear object classifier is introduced. Finally, experimental results are presented.