Separating Touching Objects in Remote Sensing Imagery: The Restricted Growing Concept and Implementations

Authors

Leen-Kiat Soh, University of NebraskaFollow
Costas Tsatsoulis, University of KansasFollow

Document Type

Article

Date of this Version

2-2000

Comments

Published in IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON IMAGE PROCESSING, VOL. 9, NO. 2, FEBRUARY 2000. Digital Object Identifier: 10.1109/83.821752 Copyright 2000 IEEE. Used by permission.

Abstract

This paper defines the restricted growing concept (RGC) for object separation and provides an algorithmic analysis of its implementations. Our concept decomposes the problem of object separation into two stages. First, separation is achieved by shrinking the objects to their cores while keeping track of their originals as masks. Then the core is grown within the masks obeying the guidelines of a restricted growing algorithm. In this paper, we apply RGC to the remote sensing domain, particularly the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sea ice images.