Segmentation of polarimetric synthetic aperture radar data

A statistical image model is proposed for segmenting polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data into regions of homogeneous and similar polarimetric backscatter characteristics. A model for the conditional distribution of the polarimetric complex data is combined with a Markov random field representation for the distribution of the region labels to obtain the posterior distribution. Optimal region labeling of the data is then defined as maximizing the posterior distribution of the region labels given the polarimetric SAR complex data (maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimate). Two procedures for selecting the characteristics of the regions are then discussed. Results using real multilook polarimetric SAR complex data are given to illustrate the potential of the two selection procedures and evaluate the performance of the MAP segmentation technique. It is also shown that dual polarization SAR data can yield segmentation resultS similar to those obtained with fully polarimetric SAR data.