Unsupervised Synthetic Aperture Radar Image Segmentation Using Fisher Distributions

Abstract

A new and fast unsupervised technique for segmentation of high-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images into homogeneous regions is proposed. This technique is based on Fisher probability density functions (pdfs) of the intensity fluctuations and on an image model that consists of a patchwork of homogeneous regions with polygonal boundaries. The segmentation is obtained by minimizing the stochastic complexity of the image. Different strategies for the pdf parameter estimation are analyzed, and a fast and robust technique is proposed. Finally, the relevance of the proposed approach is demonstrated on high-resolution SAR images.