As an intermediate step between raw remote sensing data and digital maps, remote sensing data classification has been a challenging and long-standing problem in the remote sensing research community. In this work, an automated and effective supervised classification framework is presented for classifying high-resolution remote sensing data. Specifically, the presented method proceeds in three main stages: feature extraction, classification, and classified result refinement. In the feature extraction stage, both multispectral images and 3D geometry data are used, which utilizes the complementary information from multisource data. In the classification stage, to tackle the problems associated with too many training samples and take full advantage of the information in the large-scale dataset, a random forest (RF) ensemble learning strategy is proposed by combining several RF classifiers together. Finally, an improved fully connected conditional random field (FCCRF) graph model is employed to derive the contextual information to refine the classification results. Experiments on the ISPRS Semantic Labeling Contest dataset show that the presented 3-stage method achieves 86.9% overall accuracy, which is a new state-of-the-art non-CNN (convolutional neural networks)-based classification method.

An effective approach is proposed for 3D urban scene reconstruction in the form of point cloud with semantic labeling. Starting from high resolution oblique aerial images, our approach proceeds through three main stages: geographic reconstruction, geometrical reconstruction and semantic reconstruction. The absolute position and orientation of all the cameras relative to the real world are recovered in the geographic reconstruction stage. Then, in the geometrical reconstruction stage, an improved multi-view stereo matching method is employed to produce 3D dense points with color and normal information by taking into account the prior knowledge of aerial imagery. Finally the point cloud is classified into three classes U+0028 building, vegetation, and ground U+0029 by a rule-based hierarchical approach in the semantic reconstruction step. Experiments on complex urban scene show that our proposed 3-stage approach could generate reasonable reconstruction result robustly and efficiently. By comparing our final semantic reconstruction result with the manually labeled ground truth, classification accuracies from 86.75 U+0025 to 93.02 U+0025 are obtained.

As an intermediate step between raw remote sensing data and digital urban maps, remote sensing data classification has been a challenging and long-standing research problem in the community of remote sensing. In this work, an effective classification method is proposed for classifying high-resolution remote sensing data over urban areas. Starting from high resolution multi-spectral images and 3D geometry data, our method proceeds in three main stages: feature extraction, classification, and classified result refinement. First, we extract color, vegetation index and texture features from the multi-spectral image and compute the height, elevation texture and differential morphological profile (DMP) features from the 3D geometry data. Then in the classification stage, multiple random forest (RF) classifiers are trained separately, then combined to form a RF ensemble to estimate each sample’s category probabilities. Finally the probabilities along with the feature importance indicator outputted by RF ensemble are used to construct a fully connected conditional random field (FCCRF) graph model, by which the classification results are refined through mean-field based statistical inference. Experiments on the ISPRS Semantic Labeling Contest dataset show that our proposed 3-stage method achieves 86.9% overall accuracy on the test data.