MeanShift Smoothing

Brief Description

This application smooths an image using the MeanShift algorithm.

Tags

Image Filtering, LSMS

Long Description

MeanShift [1,2,3] is an iterative edge-preserving image smoothing algorithm often used in image processing and as a first step for image segmentation. The MeanShift algorithm can be applied to multispectral images.

At first iteration, for any given pixel of the input image, the filtered value correspond to the average spectral signature of neighborhood pixels that are both spatially closer than the spatial radius parameter (spatialr) and with spectral signature that have an euclidean distance to the input pixel lower than the range radius (ranger), that is, pixels that are both close in space and in spectral signatures. Subsequent iterations will repeat this process by considering that the pixel signature corresponds to the average spectral signature computed during previous iteration, and that the pixel position corresponds to the average position of pixels used to compute the average signature.The algorithm stops when the maximum number of iterations (maxiter) is reached, or when the position and spectral signature does not change much between iterations, according to the convergence threshold (thres). If the modesearch option is used then convergence will also stops if the spatial position reaches a pixel that has already converged. This will speed-up convergence, at the expense of stability of the result.

The application outputs the image of the final averaged spectral signatures (fout), and can also optionally output the 2D displacement field between input pixel position and final pixel position after convergence (foutpos).

Note that computing an euclidean distance between spectral signatures may be inaccurate and that techniques such as color space transform or image normalisation could be applied before using this application. Also note that most satellite images noise model is not gaussian, since noise variance linearly depends on radiance (the higher the radiance, the higher the noise variance). To account for such noise model, the application provides the range radius ramp option (rangeramp), which will vary the range radius linearly with the central pixel intensity. Default value is 1. (no ramp).

This application is the first step of the large scale MeanShift method depicted in [4]. Both outputs (fout and foutpos) can be passed to the large scale MeanShift segmentation application [5]. If the application is used for large scale MeanShift, modesearch option should be off.

Parameters

Limitations

When modesearch is on, the application will yield slightly different results between executions, due to multi-threading. Results will also not be stable [4].

Authors

OTB-Team

See also

[1] Comaniciu, D., & Meer, P. (2002). Mean shift: A robust approach toward feature space analysis. IEEE Transactions on pattern analysis and machine intelligence, 24(5), 603-619.
[2] Comaniciu, D., & Meer, P. (1997, June). Robust analysis of feature spaces: color image segmentation. In Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 1997. Proceedings., 1997 IEEE Computer Society Conference on (pp. 750-755). IEEE.
[3] Comaniciu, D., & Meer, P. (1999). Mean shift analysis and applications. In Computer Vision, 1999. The Proceedings of the Seventh IEEE International Conference on (Vol. 2, pp. 1197-1203). IEEE.
[4] Michel, J., Youssefi, D., & Grizonnet, M. (2015). Stable mean-shift algorithm and its application to the segmentation of arbitrarily large remote sensing images. IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, 53(2), 952-964.
[5] LSMSSegmentation application

Example of use