Iterative SAR Segmentation by Fuzzy Hit-or-Miss and Homogeneity Index

Object-based segmentation is the first essential step for image processing applications. Recently, SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) segmentation techniques have been developed, however not enough to preserve the significant information contained in the small regions of the images. The proposed method is to partition an SAR image into homogeneous regions by using a fuzzy hit-or-miss operator with an inherent spatial transformation, which endows to preserve the small regions. In our algorithm, an iterative segmentation technique is formulated as a consequential process. Then, each time in iterating, hypothesis testing is used to evaluate the quality of the segmented regions with a homogeneity index. The segmentation algorithm is unsupervised and employed few parameters, most of which can be calculated from the input data. This comparative study indicates that the new iterative segmentation algorithm provides acceptable results as seen in the tested examples of satellite images.