Comparison of prefiltering operators for road network extraction in SAR images

The problem of detection of road networks in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images is addressed. This task is important for the registration of SAR images to existing maps and for perfect superposition of multitemporal SAR images. SAR image analysis is a difficult task because of speckle noise and textures and low signal to noise ratios. The paper focuses on the comparison of filter performances in terms of road extraction. The study points out the interest of nonlinear adaptive filtering techniques. On the other hand, it is shown that techniques dedicated to speckle noise filtering are not always the most suited to road network extraction.