Designing a New Framework Using Type-2 FLS and Cooperative-Competitive Genetic Algorithms for Road Detection from IKONOS Satellite Imagery

The growing availability of high-resolution satellite imagery provides an opportunity for identifying road objects. Most studies associated with road detection are scene-related and also based on the digital number of each pixel. Because images can provide more details (including color, size, shape, and texture), object-based processing is more advantageous. Therefore, in this paper, to handle the existing uncertainty of satellite image pixel values, using type-2 fuzzy set theory in combination with object-based image analysis is proposed. Because the main challenges of the type-2 fuzzy set are parameter tuning and extensive computations, a hybrid genetic algorithm (GA) consisting of Pittsburgh and cooperative-competitive learning schemes is proposed to address these problems. The most prominent feature of our research in this work is to establish a comprehensive object-based type-2 fuzzy logic system that enables us to detect roads in high-resolution satellite images with no training data. The validation assessment of road detection results using the proposed framework for independent images demonstrates the capability and efficiency of our method in identifying road objects. For more evaluation, a type-1 fuzzy OPEN ACCESS Remote Sens. 2015, 7 8272 logic system with the same structure as type-2 is tuned. Evaluations show that type-1 fuzzy logic system quality in training is very similar to that of the proposed type-2 fuzzy framework. However, in general, its lower accuracy, as inferred by validation assessments, makes the type-1 fuzzy logic system significantly different from the proposed type-2.