The multiplication of very high resolution (spatial or spectral) remote sensing images appears to be an opportunity to identify objects in urban and periurban areas. The classification methods applied in the object-oriented image analysis approach could be based on the use of domain knowledge. A major issue in these approaches is domain knowledge formalization and exploitation. In this paper, we propose a recognition method based on an ontology which has been developed by experts of the domain. In order to give objects a semantic meaning, we have developed a matching process between an object and the concepts of the ontology. Experiments are made on a Quickbird image. The quality of the results shows the effectiveness of the proposed method.

International audienceSupervised classification consists in learning a predictive model using a set of labeled samples. It is accepted that predictive models accuracy usually increases as more labeled samples are available. Labelled samples are generally difficult to obtain as the labelling step if often performed manually. On the contrary, unlabeled samples are easily available. As the labeling task is tedious and time consuming, users generally provide a very limited number of labeled objects. However, designing approaches able to work efficiently with a very limited number of labeled samples is highly challenging. In this context, semi-supervised approaches have been proposed to leverage from both labeled and unlabeled data. In this paper, we focus on cases where the number of labeled samples is very limited. We review and formalize eight semi-supervised learning algorithms and introduce a new method that combine supervised and unsupervised learning in order to use both labeled and unlabeled data. The main idea of this method is to produce new features derived from a first step of data clustering. These features are then used to enrich the description of the input data leading to a better use of the data distribution. The efficiency of all the methods is compared on various artificial, UCI datasets, and on the classification of a very high resolution remote sensing image. The experiments reveal that our method shows good results, especially when the number of labeled sample is very limited. It also confirms that combining labeled and unlabeled data is very useful in pattern recognition