Building extraction from very high-resolution synthetic aperture radar images based on statistical and structural information fusion

Abstract

ABSTRACTTo investigate the limits of building detection from very high-resolution (VHR) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images, a new method, based on statistical and structural information fusion, is proposed in this paper. The proposed method contains two stages: First, using order statistics constant false alarm rate (OS-CFAR) and power ratio (PR) detectors, a set of detections are made. These detections have different statistical properties, compared to the other objects, and these properties are selected for discriminating buildings from clutters. Second, the morphological analysis is used for increasing the precision of the detection. In this stage, segments, which have the most similarities to buildings in terms of shape and size, are extracted via various structural elements (SEs). The final result is obtained by fusing the two sets of detections. The experimental results on the four real VHR SAR images show that the proposed method has a high detection rate (DR) and low false alarm rate (FAR).