A solution for linking the sparse aligned pixels in multi- temporal SAR sets

In the edge detection of noisy images, low rates of false alarms may be obtained only for high detection thresholds. Unfortunately, a high threshold reduces not only the false alarms, but also the rate of true detections. Consequently, in the detected image, the edges are constituted by sparse pixels whose linking is a rather difficult task. This is, also, the case of SAR images, where speckle behaves like a strong multiplicative noise. The paper proposes a method for linking the sparse aligned pixels resulting from the linear structure detection in multi-temporal SAR sets. Our method rests on the Polar Transform (PT). Applied to the data volume represented by the multi-temporal sets and not a single image as in regular applications, the PT has a double effect: it links the sparsely detected pixels and, meantime, performs a data fusion. This latter action enhances the ability of the PT.