Factorization-Based Active Contour for Water-Land SAR Image Segmentation via the Fusion of Features

The segmentation of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) water-land images is a very difficult task not only because of strong multiplicative noise but also due to the blurred boundary, irregular shape, and together with diminished contrast. In this paper, we propose a matrix factorization active contour model based on fused features for SAR image segmentation. First, to enhance the robustness, multiple features are utilized. For each pixel location, feature maps (matrix) are constructed by combining wavelet textual features, Gaussian (DoG) filter features, and Gabor filter features via local spectral histogram, which improves spatial pattern and express image structure. Second, the energy function is constructed based on region information and edge information of SAR image. Region information is obtained via matrix factorization theory on the feature matrix. Edge information is obtained by modified the ratio of exponentially weighted averages operator. Then, a convex energy function is proposed to avoid the local minima. A fast dual formulation is introduced for the evolution of the contour. Finally, synthetic and real SAR data are used for verification. The experimental results demonstrate the proposed algorithm is effective for water/land segmentation in SAR images.