A Multi-Variate Contour Detector for High-Resolution Polarimetric SAR Images

This article presents a new method for contour detection in high-resolution polarimetric SAR images. The method is based on multi-variate statistics of speckle in homogeneous regions in a SAR image and uses a hypothesis test for the difference in variance between two adjacent regions to find the contours. The detector is directly applied on the single-look complex polarimetric SAR image. A preprocessor, which is also based on multi-variate statistics, is used to focus the attention of the detector on potentially non-homogeneous regions within the image. Results of applying the contour detector on L-band polarimetric SAR images are also presented.