A low complexity hardware architecture of K-means algorithm for real-time satellite image segmentation

The Real time monitoring of forest area, coastal regions, sea, river basins, nation borders etc. helps in quick determination of devastations caused by natural or man-made catastrophes, which can lead to emergency situations. Real-time Segmentation of satellite images is essential to detect fire, floods, volcanoes, earthquakes etc. of a specific geographical zone. Effective determination of such calamities and taking proactive measures can save a lot of lives and natural resources. In this paper, an efficient FSM based architecture is proposed for performing segmentation of satellite Images procured from NASA’s Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8 and Landsat 5. The K-means clustering algorithm even after five decades of it’s existence is quite effective and mostly used for big data applications, owing to its lower complexity. However, it’s effective implementation has started only in the last couple of years. Here a FSM-based reconfigurable architecture is proposed for K-means algorithm taking into consideration the real-time segmentation of satellite Images. Compared to other architectures in the literature, the proposed one has reduced hardware usage, lower area, power consumption with a satisfactory clock frequency, most importantly it is reconfigurable and can be used with the on-board circuitry within satellites. The testing is carried out on eight latest satellite images of natural and human devastations, taken from NASA’s OLI. The number of possible clusters within the geographical image is studied with the help of histogram analysis based on Otsu’s thresholding method. The performance analysis is carried out by computing the Peak Signal to Noise (PSNR) and Mean Structural Similarity Index (M-SSIM) of the resultant clusters. It is observed that by increasing the number of clusters, the detailed classes were effectively segmented and the quality of clustering is ensured by the improvement in PSNR and M-SSIM values. Comparison of the obtained clusters with their true land features also yielded satisfactory results.