Colour band fusion and region enhancement of spectral image using multivariate histogram

ABSTRACT Multi-spectral satellite remote sensing imagery have several applications including detection of objects or distinguishing land surface areas based on amount of greenery or water etc. The enhancement of spectral images helps extracting and visualizing spatial and spectral features. This paper identifies some specific regions of interest (RoI) of the earth's surface from the remotely sensed spectral or satellite image. The RoI are extracted and identified as major segments. Trivially, uni-variate histogram thresholding is used for gray images as a tool of segmentation. However, for color images multivariate histogram is effective to get control on color bands. It also helps emphasizing color information for clustering purpose. In this paper, the 2D and 3D histograms are used for clustering pixels in order to extract the RoI. The RGB color bands along with the infrared (IR) band information are used to form the multivariate histogram. Two datasets are used to carry out the experiment. The first one is an artificially designed dataset and the next is Indian Remotely Sensed (IRS-1A) satellite imagery. This paper proves the correctness of the proposed mathematical implication on the artificial dataset and consequently perform the application on LandSat Spectral data. The test result is found to be satisfactory.