SAR Image Segmentation Using Hierarchical Region Merging With Orientated Edge Strength Weighted Kuiper’s Distance

In this paper, a hierarchical region merging method is proposed for partitioning synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image into un-overlapping scene area, such as forest regions, urban regions, agricultural regions, and so on. The proposed method mainly consists of two steps: initial over-segmentation and hierarchical regions merging. The over-segmentation uses the watershed transform to the thresholded Bhattacharyya-coefficient-based edge strength map (BESM), and the hierarchical regions merging applies a new region merging cost weighted by a gradually increasing orientated edge strength penalty. There is a defect that the ratio-based edge detector widely used in homogeneous SAR image fails to distinguish the transitions between uniform and texture regions in high spatial resolution SAR image, and yields an initial over-segmentation result with some regions straddling multiple uniform or texture areas. To overcome this, the Bhattacharyya coefficient is used to replace the ratio-based edge detector for extracting the ESM of a SAR image by using a bi-rectangle-window configuration. Multi-scale windows are utilized to capture additional edge information. A new region merging cost is proposed based on the Kuiper's distance, weighted by a new gradually increasing orientated edge strength penalty term. The hierarchical region merging criterion is obtained with the increasing of the strength of the edge penalty. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated by comparing it qualitatively and quantitatively with several state-of-the-art methods.