Region feature extraction based on improved regularization method in SAR image

The noise existed in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image weakens the detailed features of region of interest (ROI) such as target and shadow. It also leads to the serious performance reduction of subsequent target detection, classification and recognition. The conventional regularization method could enhance target features in SAR image; however, the high computation complexity limits the real-time application of it. An improved regularization method is introduced in this paper, which increases processing speed of region feature extraction for SAR image significantly. It is theoretically proved that, by optimizing SAR projection operator, computation complexity could be reduced from O(M³N³) to O(MN) without ability losing of the region-based feature enhancement. MSTAR SAR image data is employed for algorithm experiment. The result shows that our method can increase target-to-clutter ratio significantly while restraining the noise in ROI, and then extract target and shadow from background clutters in SAR image more accurately.