Stochastic contrast measures for SAR data: A survey

“Contrast” is an generic denomination for “difference”. Measures of contrast are a powerful tool in image processing and analysis, e.g., in denoising, edge detection, segmentation, classification, parameter estimation, change detection, and feature selection. We present a survey on techniques that aim at measuring the contrast between (i) samples of SAR imagery, and (ii) samples and models, with emphasis on those that employ the statistical properties of the data

Unsupervised Change Detection Driven by Floating References: A Pattern Analysis Approach

© 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag London Ltd. part of Springer Nature. The Earth’s environment is continually changing due to both human and natural factors. Timely identification of the location and kind of change is of paramount importance in several areas of application. Because of that, remote sensing change detection is a topic of great interest. The development of precise change detection methods is a constant challenge. This study introduces a novel unsupervised change detection method based on data clustering and optimization. The proposal is less dependent on radiometric normalization than classical approaches. We carried experiments with remote sensing images and simulated datasets to compare the proposed method with other unsupervised well-known techniques. At its best, the proposal improves by 50% the accuracy concerning the second best technique. Such improvement is most noticeable with uncalibrated data. Experiments with simulated data reveal that the proposal is better than all other compared methods at any practical significance level. The results show the potential of the proposed method

Comparing samples from the G distribution using a geodesic distance

© 2019, Sociedad de Estadística e Investigación Operativa. The G distribution is widely used for monopolarized SAR image modeling because it can characterize regions with different degrees of texture accurately. It is indexed by three parameters: the number of looks (which can be estimated for the whole image), a scale parameter and a texture parameter. This paper presents a new proposal for comparing samples from the G distribution using a geodesic distance (GD) as a measure of dissimilarity between models. The objective is quantifying the difference between pairs of samples from SAR data using both local parameters (scale and texture) of the G distribution. We propose three tests based on the GD which combine the tests presented in Naranjo-Torres et al. (IEEE J Sel Top Appl Earth Obs Remote Sens 10(3):987–997, 2017), and we estimate their probability distributions using permutation methods

An Improved Minimum-Distance Texture Estimator for Speckled Data Under the G0\mathscr {G}^0 Model

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Detecting Changes in Fully Polarimetric SAR Imagery With Statistical Information Theory

© 1980-2012 IEEE. Images obtained from coherent illumination processes are contaminated with speckle. A prominent example of such imagery systems is the polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR). For such a remote sensing tool, the speckle interference pattern appears in the form of a positive-definite Hermitian matrix, which requires specialized models and makes change detection a hard task. The scaled complex Wishart distribution is a widely used model for PolSAR images. Such a distribution is defined by two parameters: the number of looks and the complex covariance matrix. The last parameter contains all the necessary information to characterize the backscattered data, and thus, identifying changes in a sequence of images can be formulated as a problem of verifying whether the complex covariance matrices differ at two or more takes. This paper proposes a comparison between a classical change detection method based on the likelihood ratio and three statistical methods that depend on information-theoretic measures: the Kullback-Leibler (KL) distance and two entropies. The performance of these four tests was quantified in terms of their sample test powers and sizes using simulated data. The tests are then applied to actual PolSAR data. The results provide evidence that tests based on entropies may outperform those based on the KL distance and likelihood ratio statistics

Statistical properties of an unassisted image quality index for SAR imagery

© 2019 by the authors. The M estimator is a recently proposed image-quality index used to evaluate the despeckling operation in SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) data. It is used also to rank despeckling filters and to improve their design. As a difference with traditional image-quality estimators, it operates not on the filtered result but on a derived one, i.e., the ratio image. However, a deep statistical analysis of its properties remains open and, with it, the ability to use it as a test statistic. In this work, we focus on obtaining insights into its distribution as well as on exploring other remarkable statistical properties of this unassisted estimator. This study is performed through EDA (Exploratory Data Analysis) and the well-known ANOVA (ANalysis Of VAriance). We test our results on a set of simulated SAR data and provide guides to enrich theMestimator to extend its capabilities

PolSAR Models with Multimodal Intensities

Polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) systems are an important remote sensing tool. Such systems can provide high spacial resolution images, but they are contaminated by an interference pattern called multidimensional speckle. This fact requires that PolSAR images receive specialised treatment; particularly, tailored models which are close to PolSAR physical formation are sought. In this paper, we propose two new matrix models which arise from applying the stochastic summation approach to PolSAR, called compound truncated Poisson complex Wishart (CTPCW) and compound geometric complex Wishart (CGCW) distributions. These models offer the unique ability to express multimodal data. Some of their mathematical properties are derived and discussed— characteristic function and Mellin-kind log-cumulants (MLCs). Moreover, maximum likelihood (ML) estimation procedures via expectation maximisation algorithm for CTPCW and CGCW parameters are furnished as well as MLC-based goodness-of-fit graphical tools. Monte Carlo experiment results indicate ML estimates perform at what is asymptotically expected (small bias and mean square error) even for small sample sizes. Finally, our proposals are employed to describe actual PolSAR images, presenting evidence that they can outperform other well-known distributions, such as WmC, Gm0 , and Km

Non-Local Means Filters for Full Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar Images with Stochastic Distances

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Scattering Purity and Complexity in Radar Polarimetry

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Revisiting the effect of spatial resolution on information content based on classification results

© 2019, © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (PolSAR) images are an important source of information. Speckle noise gives SAR images a granular appearance that makes interpretation and analysis hard tasks. A major issue is the assessment of information content in these kinds of images, and how it is affected by usual processing techniques. Previous works have resulted in various approaches for quantifying image information content. In this paper, we study this problem from the classification accuracy viewpoint, focusing on the filtering and the classification stages. Thus, through classified images, we verify how changing the properties of the input data affects their quality. The input is an actual PolSAR image, the control parameters are (i) the filter (Local Mean, LM, or Model-Based PolSAR, MBPolSAR) and the size of their support, and (ii) the classification method (Maximum Likelihood, ML, or Support Vector Machine, SVM), and the output is the precision of the classification algorithm applied to the filtered data. To expand the conclusions, this study deals not only with Classification Accuracy but also with Kappa and Overall Accuracy as measures of map precision. Experiments were conducted on two airborne PolSAR images. Differently from what was observed in previous works, almost all quality measures are good and increase with degradation, i.e. the filtering algorithms that we used always improve the classification results at least up to supports of size 7 × 7