Texture-based Segmentation for Identification of

Geological Units in Remotely Sensed Imagery

Arko Lucieer, Orkhonselenge Tsolmongerel and Alfred Stein
International Institute for Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC)
P.O. Box 6, 7500 AA Enschede, The Netherlands
Phone: +31 53 4874256, Fax: +31 53 3874335
lucieer@itc.nl, tsolmongerel@itc.nl and stein@itc.nl

January 30, 2004

1 Introduction
This study proposes a segmentation procedure based on multivariate texture to
extract spatial objects from an image scene. Object uncertainty is quantified
to identify transitions zones of objects with indeterminate boundaries. The
Local Binary Pattern (LBP) operator, modelling texture, is integrated into a
hierarchical splitting segmentation to identify homogeneous texture regions in
an image. We apply a multivariate extension of the standard univariate LBP
operator to describe colour texture [1]. The paper is illustrated with a case
study. It considers identification of geological units in ASTER imagery of the
Dungovi aimag, Southern Mongolia. The multivariate LBP operator segments
the area into meaningful geological objects, yielding valuable information on
uncertainty at the transition zones. Geospatial data quality is a topic frequently
covered in recent scientific literature on GIS and remote sensing. Important
components of data quality are uncertainty and accuracy. Therefore, we focus
on suitable accuracy measures to validate the segmentation result.

2 Study Area and Imagery

The study area is located in Dundgovi aimag/province, Southern Mongolia (lon-
gitude: 105◦ 500 48.3900 –106◦ 260 14.5700 , lattitude: 46◦ 010 08.7600 –46◦ 180 04.3800 ).
The area is characterised by an arid, mountainous-steppe zone with elevations
between 1300 m and 1700 m. We distinguish the following geological units:
Createcious basalt (K1), Permian-Triassic sandstone (P-T), Proterozoic gran-
ite (yP R), Triassic-Jurassic granite (yT3 − J1 ) (intrusive rock outcrop), and
Triassic-Jurassic andesite (aT3 − J1 ) (figure 1).

1
 Spectral and spatial data gathered through remote sensing can provide in-
formation about many features of the Earth’s surface that are of interest to the
geologist. Furthermore by combining surface observation with geologic knowl-
edge and insights, geologists are able to make valid inferences about subsurface
materials.
For the identification of general geological units we use Advanced Space-
borne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) imagery. The
ASTER image scene is acquired on 21 May, 2002. The multispectral ASTER
data covers a wide portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, covering the visible-
near infrared, the shortwave and the thermal infrared in 14 discrete channels.
Level 1B data as used in this study is radiometrically calibrated and geometri-
cally co-registered for all ASTER bands. The combination of ASTER shortwave
infrared (SWIR) bands are highly useful for extraction of information on rock and
soil types. Figure 2(a) shows a colour composite of ASTER band combination
9, 6 and 4 in the SWIR range.
An important aspect of this study is validation of geological units derived
with segmentation. Reference data in the form of a geological map was obtained
by expert field observation and image interpretation (figure 1).

Figure 1: Geological map derived from field observations and image inter-
pretation, Dundgovi aimag, Southern Mongolia.

3 Texture model
A relatively new and simple texture descriptor is the local binary pattern oper-
ator (LBP) [2]. The method is based on recognizing that certain local binary
patterns are fundamental properties of local image texture, and their occur-

2
rence histogram proves to be a very powerful texture feature. Lucieer et al. [1]
extended the univariate LBP measure to model multivariate texture. In this
study, we apply the multivariate LBP model to three bands to take into ac-
count interactions between bands. To complete this multivariate LBP measure
with contrast and variance information we included the 3D colour histogram,
in which each 8-bit band is quantized into 32 levels. The texture model for an
image region is a combination of an LBP histogram and a 3D colour histogram.
In classifying texture, we evaluate the (dis)similarity of sample and model
histograms as a test of goodness-of-fit using a nonparametric statistic, the log-
likelihood ratio statistic. Here, the sample is a histogram of the texture measure
distribution of an image window. The model is a histogram of a reference image
window of a particular class [1].

4 Segmentation and uncertainty

We apply a hierarchical splitting segmentation procedure to identify areas with
homogeneous texture in the image. We calculate the texture model for each
image (sub)block to test on texture homogeneity. When we have obtained
the final quadtree or subdivision of the image, we classify the blocks according
to their texture model. From the histogram similarity measures of the image
blocks, we compute a confusion index, depicting object vagueness. This measure
provides a way for depicting thematic and spatial uncertainty of the identified
objects [1].
Preliminary results show that good segmentations results are obtained with
multivariate texture-based segmentation. We are able to distinguish meaningful
geological units in the ASTER imagery. Figure 2 shows a visual comparison of
the ASTER image with the derived segmentation result.

5 Segmentation validation
Segmentation validation is an important aspect to determine the data quality
of the result. Many algorithms have been proposed to evaluate the performance
of image segmentation techniques [4]. These methods study the location, size,
and shape of the objects in comparison to a reference image. In this study, we
derive the reference image from the geological map. First, we extract object
edges from both segmented image and reference image. Then, we compute
the Closest Distance Metric (CDM) [3] to quantify the number of edge pixels
correctly identified. For each edge pixel in the segmented image we inspect
the local area in the reference image to find a possible match. If there are
multiple possible matches we select the pixel from the reference image that is
closest. We assume that edge pixels in the orthogonal direction are closer than
pixels in the diagonal direction. Therefore, we introduce a cost function to
adapt CDM. CDM depicts the percentage of edge pixels correctly segmented,

3
 (a) Colour composite of band 9, 6 and (b) Segmentation results based on mul-
4 of an ASTER image, acquired on 21 tivariate LBP-RGB3D texture model.
May. 2002.

Figure 2: ASTER image and segmented geological objects of the study area,
Dundgovi aimag, Southern Mongolia.

allowing a small edge displacements. This measure gives a quantification of

segmentation accuracy. Future research will focus on derivation of CDM from
our segmentation results. Additionally, we will extend the CDM measure taking
into account uncertainty derived from the segmentation algorithm.

References
[1] A. Lucieer, A. Stein, and P.F. Fisher. Texture-based segmentation of high-
resolution remotely sensed imagery for identification of fuzzy objects. In
Proceedings of GeoComputation 2003 conference, Southampton, UK, 2003.
CDROM.

[2] T. Ojala, M. Pietikäinen, and T. Mäenpää. Multiresolution gray-scale and

rotation invariant texture classification with local binary patterns. IEEE
Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Macine Intelligence, 24(7):971–987,
2002.

[3] M.S. Prieto and A.R. Allen. A similarity metric for edge images. IEEE
Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 25(10):1265–
1273, 2003.

[4] Y. J. Zhang. A survey on evaluation methods for image segmentation.

Pattern Recognition, 29(8):1335–1346, 1996.