Roger L. King

In a disaster, there is a need for rapid image-information retrieval in real or near real time from vast amounts of data coming from multiple remote-sensing sensors. In general, image information mining (IIM) approaches produce enormous amounts of features that are computationally expensive and inefficient to process before the actual information discovery takes place. Also, it is complicated because the combination of the features has little relevance to the hypothesis space. Hence, selecting a relevant subset of features is necessary to overcome these problems and to provide an efficient representation of the target class. In this letter, we propose feature selection and feature transformations based on a wrapper-based genetic algorithm approach. A support vector machine classification is applied for generating predictive models for those land-cover classes that are important in a coastal disaster event. The proposed system, rapid IIM, is a region-based approach where, in lieu of the prevalent pixel-based methods, it localizes interesting zones and enables rapid querying. Results from this study indicate that selecting relevant feature subsets increases the rate of correctly identifying a semantic class and also enables this process with less number of features.