ALLOCATION OF REMOTELY SENSED DATA USING MARKOV MODELS FOR IMAGE DATA AND PIXEL LABELS

For remotely sensed data, this paper reviews the Bayesian approach to the allocation of picture elements (pixels) to groups. Group labels are assumed a priori to be spatially correlated and, conditional on the labels, the image data are also assumed to be spatially correlated. The models considered have the property that the posterior distribution of the pixel labels given the image data inherits conditional independence constraints. Two allocation algorithms which exploit this fad are discussed. These algorithms are based on maximising the posterior distribution, and involve the use of neighbouring image and label data to update the label of any given pixel. The effect of spatial correlation in the image data on allocation performance is examined.