SAR Image Edge Detection With Recurrent Guidance Filter

Abstract

While traditional edge detectors concentrate on modifying the shape of the window function, we consider the edge detection problem from a new perspective, and an effective recurrent guidance filter is proposed in this letter. The proposed filter is elaborately designed for edge detection tasks and aims to remove the nonedge information including speckle noise and detailed texture and preserve edge information simultaneously. We first filter the image by the proposed filter and a filtered image is obtained. Then, by using the edge detector with the Gaussian-shaped window, which was previously proposed by us and performing the postprocessing method, the edge response is extracted from the filtered image. Both objective and subjective experimental results on simulated and real synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images demonstrate that the edge detector based on the recurrent guidance filter yields better performance than the state-of-the-art edge detectors.