SAR image segmentation by stochastic complexity minimization with a nonparametric noise model

Abstract

We analyze the generalization of a parametric segmentation technique adapted to Gamma-distributed synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images to nonparametric noise models. This approach is based on a polygonal grid which can have an arbitrary topology and whose number of regions and regularity of its boundaries are obtained by minimizing the stochastic complexity of a quantified version on Q levels of the image. It thus leads to a criterion without parameters to be tuned by the user and adapted to different noise models. We analyze the influence of the quantization scheme and of the optimization procedure on the quality of the partitioning. We then compare the performance of the proposed approach to the parametric one on synthetic images. Finally, we show results obtained on real images and compared with a standard segmentation algorithm of SAR images