Study of Binary Partition Tree Pruning Techniques for Polarimetric SAR Images

This paper investigates several pruning techniques applied on Binary Partition Trees (BPTs) and their usefulness for low-level processing of PolSAR images. BPTs group pixels to form homogeneous regions, which are hierarchically structured by inclusion in a binary tree. They provide multiple resolutions of description and easy access to subsets of regions. Once constructed, BPTs can be used for a large number of applications. Many of these applications consist in populating the tree with a specific feature and in applying a graph-cut called pruning to extract a partition of the space. In this paper, different pruning examples involving the optimization of a global criterion are discussed and analyzed in the context of PolSAR images for segmentation. Initial experiments are also reported on the use of Minkowski norms in the definition of the optimization criterion.