Indexing satellite images with features computed from man-made structures on the earth's surface

Indexing and retrieval from remote sensing image databases relies on the extraction of appropriate information from the data about the entity of interest (e.g. land cover type) and on the robustness of this extraction to nuisance variables. Other entities in an image may be strongly correlated with the entity of interest and their properties can therefore be used to characterize this entity. The road network contained in an image is one example. The properties of road networks vary considerably from one geographical environment to another, and they can therefore be used to classify and retrieve such environments. In this paper, we define several such environments, and classify them with the aid of geometrical and topological features computed from the road networks occurring in them. The relative failure of network extraction methods in certain types of urban area obliges us to segment such areas and to add a second set of geometrical and topological features computed from the segmentations. To validate the approach, feature selection and SVM linear kernel classification are performed on the feature set arising from a diverse image database.