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This article is concerned with the use of unsupervised methods to process very high resolution satellite images with minimal or little human intervention. In a context where more and more complex and very high resolution satellite images are available, it has become increasingly difficult to propose learning sets for supervised algorithms to process such data and even more complicated to process them manually. Within this context, in this article we propose a fully unsupervised step by step method to process very high resolution images, making it possible to link clusters to the land cover classes of interest. For each step, we discuss the various challenges and state of the art algorithms to make the full process as efficient as possible. In particular, one of the main contributions of this article comes in the form of a multi-scale analysis clustering algorithm that we use during the processing of the image segments. Our proposed methods are tested on a very high resolution image (Pléiades) of the urban area around the French city of Strasbourg and show relevant results at each step of the process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The automated detection and mapping of landslides from Very High Resolution (VHR) images present several challenges related to the heterogeneity of landslide sizes, shapes and soil surface characteristics. However, a common geomorphological characteristic of landslides is to be organized with a series of embedded and scaled features. These properties motivated the use of a multiresolution image analysis approach for their detection. In this work, we propose a hybrid segmentation/classification region-based method, devoted to this specific issue. The method, which uses images of the same area at various spatial resolutions (Medium to Very High Resolution), relies on a recently introduced top-down hierarchical framework. In the specific context of landslide analysis, two main novelties are introduced to enrich this framework. The first novelty consists of using non-spectral information, obtained from Digital Terrain Model (DTM), as a priori knowledge for the guidance of the segmentation/classification process. The second novelty consists of using a new domain adaptation strategy, that allows to reduce the expert’s interaction when handling large image datasets. Experiments performed on satellite images acquired over terrains affected by landslides demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method with different hierarchical levels of detail addressing various operational needs. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]