On the use of virtual information in SAR image analysis

Summary form only given. Segmentation algorithms have been developed in order to analyze not only intensity images but also some virtual ones, obtained either by histogram-based techniques or by an adaptive technique using the fractal approach. With regard to this last method, the fractal dimension has been used as a parameter that represents the local roughness of a surface. The first operation to be performed is the smoothing of the input images to reduce speckle noise. This has been done with a rank-order operator, which is segmentation-oriented, in that it allows the locally most representative grey value from an ordinated set of grey levels in a processing window to be extracted; therefore, new grey levels cannot be generated