Method for Water Object Extraction in SAR Imagery Based on Morphology and Blind Source Separation

Abstract:

A new method is proposed for speckle noise suppression and water objects extracting from synthetic aperture radar(SAR)imagery based on morphology and independent component analysis(ICA)blind source separation(BSS).The distribution of SAR image data with multiplicative speckle noise is nonGausssian and its parameters are unknown.Logarithmic Quantification is utilized to transform multiplicative speckle noise to independent additive noise.Speckle noise and image data are separated from multipolarimetric imagery,and the components with the least speckle index are chosen as the object component automatically by means of ICA while the specific distribution of SAR imagery is unnecessary.Water objects are extracted from the separated component imagery based on Morphology Open Reconstruction according to their lightness and region shape features.Experimental results for ENVISAT ASAR show that the method can extract water objects from the multipolarimetric imagery with high accuracy and fast speed.

Key words:synthetic aperture radar; water target; automatic recognition; blind source separation; independent component analysis; mathematical morphology; open reconstruction