SAR image segmentation using MSER and improved spectral clustering

A novel approach is presented for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image segmentation. By incorporating the advantages of maximally stable extremal regions (MSER) algorithm and spectral clustering (SC) method, the proposed approach provides effective and robust segmentation. First, the input image is transformed from a pixelbased to a region-based model by using the MSER algorithm. The input image after MSER procedure is composed of some disjoint regions. Then the regions are treated as nodes in the image plane, and a graph structure is applied to represent them. Finally, the improved SC is used to perform globally optimal clustering, by which the result of image segmentation can be generated. To avoid some incorrect partitioning when considering each region as one graph node, we assign different numbers of nodes to represent the regions according to area ratios among the regions. In addition, K-harmonic means instead of K-means is applied in the improved SC procedure in order to raise its stability and performance. Experimental results show that the proposed approach is effective on SAR image segmentation and has the advantage of calculating quickly.