This paper proposes an image segmentation method for synthetic aperture radar (SAR), exploring statistical properties of SAR data to characterize image regions. We consider G⁰A distribution parameters for SAR image segmentation, combined to the level set framework. The G⁰A distribution belongs to a class of G distributions that have been successfully used to model different regions in amplitude SAR images for data modeling purpose. Such statistical data model is fundamental to deriving the energy functional to perform region mapping, which is input into our level set propagation numerical scheme that splits SAR images into homogeneous, heterogeneous, and extremely heterogeneous regions. Moreover, we introduce an assessment procedure based on stochastic distance and the G⁰A model to quantify the robustness and accuracy of our approach. Our results demonstrate the accuracy of the algorithms regarding experiments on synthetic and real SAR data.
This paper presents an approach to accomplish synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image segmentation, which are corrupted by speckle noise. Some ordinary segmentation techniques may require speckle filtering previously. Our approach performs radar image segmentation using the original noisy pixels as input data, eliminating preprocessing steps, an advantage over most of the current methods. The algorithm comprises a statistical region growing procedure combined with hierarchical region merging to extract regions of interest from SAR images. The region growing step oversegments the input image to enable region aggregation by employing a combination of the KolmogorovSmirnov (KS) test with a hierarchical stepwise optimization (HSWO) algorithm for the process coordination. We have tested and assessed the proposed technique on artificially speckled image and real SAR data containing different types of targets 1 .
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