Saliency detection of targets in polarimetric SAR images based on globally weighted perturbation filters

Abstract In this paper, a saliency detection for Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (PolSAR) images is proposed based on weighted perturbation filters. Auxiliary data is demanded to identify polarimetric vector of targets, for a canonical perturbation filter. Only if the target signature was available and accurate, it would be satisfiable to apply the filter in practice. Besides, not every target can usually be detected by an individual filter, because of variant polarimetric characteristics of targets with respect to different aspects or shapes. To overcome these drawbacks, several perturbation filters are combined in the proposed method. By initializing with different parameters, these filters decompose PolSAR data into their index maps. Then, aiming to find out filters of interest, i.e., ones related to target pixels, we assume that targets to detect are sparse in PolSAR image. Thus, saliency weights are assigned to the filters, based on Jaccard distances of their index maps. Therein, the spatial sparseness between objects and their surrounding derives high weights for corresponding filters. And then, after globally fusion of refined filtering responses with the weights, saliency map is generated for every local pattern in PolSAR image. Finally, the target regions are extracted from this map, by thresholding and morphological operation. Experiments performed on real and simulated PolSAR data verify the performance of this method, in comparison with several common PolSAR detectors. Also, the proposed method finds out most targets in ground truth, without auxiliary polarimetric information provided.