A Novel Approach for Segmentation of Sector Scan Sonar Images using Adaptive Thresholding

Abstract

The SAR and SAS images are perturbed by a multiplicative noise called speckle, due to the coherent nature of the scattering phenomenon. If the background of an image is uneven, the fixed thresholding technique is not suitable to segment an image using adaptive thresholding method. In this paper a new Adaptive thresholding method is proposed to reduce the speckle noise, preserving the structural features and textural information of Sector Scan SONAR (Sound Navigation and Ranging) images. Due to the massive proliferation of SONAR images, the proposed method is very appealing in under water environment applications. In fact it is a pre- treatment required in any SONAR images analysis system. The results obtained from the proposed method were compared quantitatively and qualitatively with the results obtained from the other speckle reduction techniques and demonstrate its higher performance for speckle reduction in the SONAR images.