On the application of Gabor filtering in supervised image classification

Image texture can be an important source of data in the image classification process. Although not as easily measurable as image spectral attributes, image texture has proved in a number of cases to be a valuable source of data capable of increasing the accuracy of the classification process. In remote sensing there are cases in which classes are spectrally very similar, but present distinct spatial distribution, i.e. different textural characteristics. Image texture becomes then an important source of information in the classification process. The aim of this study is (1) to develop and test a supervised image classification method based on the image spatial texture as extracted by the Gabor filtering concept and (2) to investigate experimentally the performance of the classification process as a function of the Gabor filter's parameters. A set of Gabor filters is initially generated for the given image data. The filter parameters related to the relevant spatial frequencies present in the image are estimated from the available samples via the Fourier transform. Each filter generates one filtered image which characterizes the particular spatial frequency implemented by the filter parameters. As a result, a number of filtered images, sometimes referred to as 'textural bands', are generated and the originally univariate problem is transformed into a multivariate one, every pixel being defined by a vector with dimension identical to the number of filters used. The multidimensional image data can then be classified by implementing an appropriate supervised classification method. In this study the Euclidean Minimum Distance and the Gaussian Maximum Likelihood classifiers are used. The adequacy of the selected Gabor filter parameters (namely, the spatial frequency and the filter's spatial extent) are then examined as a function of the resulting classification accuracy. The proposed supervised methodology is tested using both synthetic and real image data. Results are presented and analysed.