Water body segmentation of Synthetic Aperture Radar image using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Abstract

Deep Convolutional Neural Networks are finding their way into modern machine learning tasks and proved themselves to become one of the best contenders for future development in the field. Several proposed methods in image segmentation and classification problems are giving us satisfactory results and could even perform better than humans in image recognition tasks. But also at the cost of their performance, they also require a huge amount of images for training and huge amount of computing power and time that makes them unrealistic in some situations where obtaining a large dataset is not feasible. In this work, an attempt is made for segmentation of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images which are not usually abundant enough for training, and are heavily affected by a kind of multiplicative noise called speckle noise. For the segmentation task, pre-defined filters are first applied to the images and are fed to hybrid CNN that is resulted from the concept of Inception and U-Net. The outcome of our proposed method has been examined for their effectiveness of application in a complete set of SAR images that are not used for training. The accuracy has also been compared with the manually annotated SAR images.