The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences. Vol. XXXVII. Part B4. Beijing 2008 
spatial indexes to automatically maintain the topology between 
parent and child parcels. 
Image 
Parcel number 
Time consuming 
Evaluation of segmentation precision 
Our 
method 
eCognition 
Our 
method 
eCognition 
SPOT-5 multi- 
spectral (687x569) 
229 
366 
About 
28s 
About 8s 
Both methods segment the urban, 
rivers, ponds, mountains etc. 
correctly, but our method better 
keeps the boundary of the ponds. 
IKONOS 
panchromatic 
(1142x787) 
283 
515 
About 
65s 
About 15s 
The segmentations of both methods 
are totally similar. eCognition is 
more regular in shapes, but with 
fragmentized parcels distributing 
around the boundary of many even- 
tone, large-size parcels. 
Google Earth 
screen capture 
(1208x796) 
811 
1778 
About 
58s 
About 17s 
Similar in segmentations. Both with 
some errors. eCogntion is more 
regular in shapes, but with the above 
mentioned fragmentized parcels. 
Table 1. Comparison of our method and the multi-resolution segmentation module of eCognition 
Figure 1. Segmentation of a SPOT-5 image with scale 40 
Figure 2. Segmentation of an Ikonos image with scale 80 
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