Object-Based Image Analysis (OBIA) – also Geographic Object-Based Image Analysis (GEOBIA) – "is a sub-discipline of geoinformation science devoted to (...) partitioning remote sensing (RS) imagery into meaningful image-objects, and assessing their characteristics through spatial, spectral and temporal scale".[2]
The two main processes in OBIA are (1) segmentation and (2) classification. Traditional image segmentation is on a per-pixel basis. However, OBIA groups pixels into homogeneous objects. These objects can have different shapes and scale. Objects also have statistics associated with them which can be used to classify objects. Statistics can include geometry, context and texture of image objects. The analyst defines statistics in the classification process to generate land cover
Each of these application areas has spawned separate subfields of digital image analysis, with a large collection of specialized algorithms and concepts—and with their own journals, conferences, technical societies, and so on.