Supervised classification of K-distributed SAR images of natural targets and probability of error estimation

Abstract

A radiometric and textural classification method for the single-channel synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image is proposed, which explicitly takes into account the probability density function (pdf) of the underlying cross section for K-distributed images. This method makes extensive use of adaptive preprocessing methods (e.g. Gamma-Gamma MAP speckle filtering), in order to ensure good classification accuracy as well as fair preservation of the spatial resolution of the final result. Error rates can be estimated during the training step, allowing one to select only relevant reflectivity classes and to save computation time in trials. The classification method is based on a maximum likelihood (ML) segmentation of the filtered image. Finally, a texture criterion is introduced to improve the accuracy of the classification result.