AssesSeg—A Command Line Tool to Quantify Image Segmentation Quality: A Test Carried Out in Southern Spain from Satellite Imagery

Abstract

This letter presents the capabilities of a command line tool created to assess the quality of segmented digital images. The executable source code, called AssesSeg, was written in Python 2.7 using open source libraries. AssesSeg (University of Almeria, Almeria, Spain; Politecnico di Bari, Bari, Italy) implements a modified version of the supervised discrepancy measure named Euclidean Distance 2 (ED2) and was tested on different satellite images (Sentinel-2, Landsat 8, and WorldView-2). The segmentation was applied to plastic covered greenhouse detection in the south of Spain (Almería). AssesSeg outputs were utilized to find the best band combinations for the performed segmentations of the images and showed a clear positive correlation between segmentation accuracy and the quantity of available reference data. This demonstrates the importance of a high number of reference data in supervised segmentation accuracy assessment problems.

Keywords

• AssesSeg
• segmentation quality
• greenhouses
• Sentinel-2 Multi Spectral Instrument (MSI)
• Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI)
• WorldView-2 (WV2)