Evaluation of Retrieved Categories from a TerraSAR-X Benchmarking Data Set

Abstract

Advanced interpretation of satellite images calls for automated content analysis as well as interactive content search. A typical example of such systems is EOLib, an ESA funded project that already demonstrated the application potential of TerraSAR-X data within a satellite payload ground segment. In this paper, we analyze the validation results of image content classification using a large set of selected TerraSAR-X images. The classification was done with a cascaded learning method. The main advantage of this method is a coarse-to-fine approach for semantically annotating pixel patches with decreasing size. Once a reliable label is found for a given pixel patch, no further subdivision into still smaller patch sizes is necessary. This leads to a considerable reduction of the computational effort during classification of large-size satellite images.