Object oriented image segmentation by means of multichannel mathematical morphology

The generation of agro-statistics in tropical regions, using remote sensing data, is a difficult task due to the presence of high variety of crops at a given time over the same area that are not restricted by a crop calendar. The proposed segmentation is developed into two phases: spatial and spectral. The spatial segmentation is based in using multidimensional mathematical morphology for the delimitation of the objects that define each of the production segments or plots. The basic multi-dimensional morphologic operators (dilatation, erosion and gradient), were defined to be adapted to the study of agricultural areas using multi-spectral imagery. Meanwhile, the spectral segmentation is performed assigning the dominant spectral signature to each spatial segment to reduce its number using a hierarchical grouping method.