J4 ›› 2010, Vol. 37 ›› Issue (3): 492-495.doi: 10.3969/j.issn.1001-2400.2010.03.019

• Original Articles • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Level set SAR image segmentation method combined with ratio edge information

Lü Yan;FENG Da-zheng   

  1. (School of Electronic Engineering, Xidian Univ., Xi'an  710071, China)
  • Received:2009-06-17 Online:2010-06-20 Published:2010-07-23
  • Contact: Lü Yan E-mail:ylv@mail.xidian.edu.cn

Abstract:

A variational level set synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image segmentation method based on edge and region information is proposed. An energy functional adapted for SAR image segmentation is defined, which consists of an active contour without the edge model and the edge information of SAR image by the Ratio operator with CFAR. Partial differential equations (PDE) of curve evolution are obtained by minimization of the energy functional. To implement image segmentation, the solution of the PDEs by a variational level set approach is applied. The performance of the method is verified by both synthetic and real SAR images. It is shown that the method can accurately extract targets from the SAR image but without any despeckle step, which possesses a preferable edge accuracy.

Key words: synthetic aperture radar, image segmentation, level set, edge information, partial differential equation