SAR Image Registration and Segmentation Using an Estimated DEM

Synthetic aperture radar SAR images are notoriously dii-cult to interpret. Segmentation is simpliied if a digital map is available, to which the image can be registered. Also, registration is simpliied if a digital elevation model DEM is available. In this paper it is shown that, if a DEM is unavailable, it can be estimated by minimising an energy functional consisting of a measure of agreement b e t ween the SAR image and a digital map together with a thin-plate bending-energy term. A computationally-eecient, nite-element algorithm is proposed to solve the optimisation problem. The method is applied to automatically align an airborne SAR image with a digital map of eld boundaries, producing an image which is simultaneously registered and segmented.