A first step toward automatic interpretation of SAR images using evidential fusion of several structure detectors

We propose a method aiming to characterize the spatial organization of the main cartographic elements of a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image and thus giving an almost automatic interpretation of the scene. Our approach is divided into three main steps which build the whole image interpretation gradually. The first step consists of applying low-level detectors taking the speckle statistics into account and extracting some raw information from the scene. The detector responses are then fused in a second step using Dempster–Shafer theory, thus allowing the modeling of the knowledge that we have about operators, including possible ignorance and their limits. A third step gives the final image interpretation using contextual knowledge between the different classes. Results of the whole method applied to different SAR images and to various landscapes are presented.