Dark Area Classification From Airborne SAR Images Based on Deep Margin Learning

The dark area in the SAR image corresponds to the zero-energy electromagnetic echo region because specular reflection occurs when the emitted electromagnetic wave (EMW) comes into contact with a smooth object on the ground. In addition, EWM sometimes cannot measure the entire portion of the ground object due to the incident angle of the actual aperture radar sensor and the height of the object on the ground, which creates a dark area in the SAR image called a SAR shadow. Therefore, it is challenging to distinguish the dark area from shadows or some ground objects with smooth surfaces. To address this problem, this paper proposes a novel deep marginal learning algorithm (DMLA) to implement the dark zone classification of airborne SAR images. Specifically, a novel Snake Search Algorithm (SSA) with a chain code is deployed to generate margin slices of dark areas in SAR images, which is used as the input to the following classification network. In addition, a deep convolutional neural network with simple architecture is constructed to train the margin slices of the SSA, which outputs the final classification results with labels. Finally, experiments on three public airborne SAR image datasets output the average classification accuracy of 98.775% for the dark margin slices and an accuracy of 100% to identify dark regions in the original SAR images. The proposed method not only contributes to a high classification accuracy but also improves time efficiency.