Happy New Year 2016

The year 2015 is ending very shortly.

I wish every readers of my blog an exciting new year ahead that is full of happiness and prosperity.

From my blog statistics, most of my visitors comes from the US and Europe. There is negligible traffic coming from developing countries. This can be correlated to the fact that exploitation of geo-spatial data in developing countries is still in infant stage. On average, I tend to get around 600 visits on my blog, which is not a lot but its good to see that someone actually bothers to read the posts that i wrote. When i get an email from my visitors mentioning that some posts helped them to do things in their professional life, i am over the moon on that day :). 

These are the all-time top 10 posts within my blog that seems to be attracted to many users. Some of the post that I have written in 2010-11 is still very popular among visitors, specially related to ArcGIS. The post related to GIS gets more hits than those related to Remote Sensing. I tend to write less related to GIS posts as I don’t work with GIS day in and day out.  I will write more related to Remote Sensing in coming days. The top ten blogs post are related to MATLAB : 5  ARCGIS: 4 and eCognition: 1. I could not get the posts specific statistics for 2014 from blogger but lately my eCognition related blogs are liked by many visitors. I have made few friends through my blogs which is awesome.

1. KMLcreation using MATLAB
2. Openingmultispectral or hyperspectral ENVI files in MATLAB
3. Convertingraster dataset to XYZ in ARCGIS !!
4. UtilizingNumpy to perform complex GIS operation in ARCGIS 10
5. Data DrivenMap Book in ArcGIS 10
6. ArcPy :Python scripting in ArcGIS 10
7. MATLAB GUIfor 3D point generation from SR 4000 images
8. MATLABtutorial: Dividing image into blocks and applying a function
9. MATLABTutorial: Finding center pivot irrigation fields in a high resolution image
10. eCognitionTutorial: Finding trees and buildings from LiDAR with limited information

eCognition Tutorial: How to find segments which have lower mean value to the neighbouring segments with additional condition to class?

I have segmented data, classified into two classes: 1, 2. I would like to find segments into the 1 class which are adjacent to the 2 class and have lower mean value. The one condition should be: Existence of 2 > 0, but how to combine it with information about lower mean value of segment?

This is a problem posted in the eCognition community by one of the user. One of the core strength of OBIA is to incorporate contextual information and class related information in the process which is difficult with pixel-based approaches. Here the class of interest has to satisfy two contextual class related information:

1)      It must be bordering the class 2

2)      It must be class 1 and must have lower mean value

The Problem

For this problem, we have to make a class related feature ( Class-Related features >  Relation to neigbor objects > Mean diff. to  ) that is based on a layer of interest and class. For demonstration purpose I will be using NIR layer. So the feature that is created is “Mean diff to nir, class 2”. In the following figure, we can see the feature “Mean diff to nir, class 2” on the right side. In the figure, objects that are not bordering the class 2 have undefined value (red), the objects that are bordering the class 2 and have lower “Mean diff to nir, class 2”,  have smaller value (darker) and the objects that are bordering the class 2 and have higher “Mean diff to nir, class 2”,  have higher value (brighter).




The custom feature

 

For better illustration I have attached some figures that also show values for “Mean diff to nir, class 2” feature.

Class 2 object

Class 1 object not bordering class 2

Class 2 objects bordering Class 1

Unclassified object bordering Class 1

  

Afterwards, the extraction of objects of interest is straight forward. We use assign class algorithm for that purpose.

 

Assign class

The solution. Pink color represent objects we are attempting to extract.