Image analysis by integration of disparate information

Image analysis often starts with some preliminary segmentation which provides a representation of the scene needed for further interpretation. Segmentation can be performed in several ways, which are categorized as pixel based, edge-based, and region-based. Each of these approaches are affected differently by various factors, and the final result may be improved by integrating several or all of these methods, thus taking advantage of their complementary nature. In this paper, we propose an approach that integrates pixel-based and edge-based results by utilizing an iterative relaxation technique. This approach has been implemented on a massively parallel computer and tested on some remotely sensed imagery from the Landsat-Thematic Mapper (TM) sensor.