An application of object-based analysis of satellite imagery on waste

Traditional image processing and image interpretation methods are usually based only on the information extracted from features intrinsic of single pixel: the object’s physical properties, which are determined by the real world and the imaging situation - basically sensor and illumina-tion. A limitation of this method is that it allows to evaluate only a part of the information content of the images, without exploring the appearance as important as geometric-textural information.
The application of Object Based Image Analysis on very high resolution data allows, with an au-tomatic or semi-automatic process – with a minimal manual participation - a good classification also in presence of high and very high resolution data, where higher is the chance of error. The fi-nal classification, through a suitable hierarchy of classes that takes into account the relationships between the produced segmentation levels, may be highly accurate. Thus we introduce other rules for the location of the context, and the relations between the objects meaningfully increases the chance of automatic recognition of objects on the land surface. The availability of object-based techniques allows an elaboration of satellite data to detect situations of illegality as the uncon-trolled storage of waste. Through the inclusion in the segmentation process of a shapefile contain-ing some detected test areas, we proceed to the recognition of the landfill areas. In this work we al-so use some cadastral data for multiresolution segmentation and object-based classification.