Region-Based Classification of Polarimetric SAR Images Using Wishart MRF

The scattering measurements of individual pixels in polarimetric SAR images are affected by speckle; hence, the performance of classification approaches, taking individual pixels as elements, would be damaged. By introducing the spatial relation between adjacent pixels, a novel classification method, taking regions as elements, is proposed using a Markov random field (MRF). In this method, an image is oversegmented into a large amount of rectangular regions first. Then, to use fully the statistical a priori knowledge of the data and the spatial relation of neighboring pixels, a Wishart MRF model, combining the Wishart distribution with the MRF, is proposed, and an iterative conditional mode algorithm is adopted to adjust oversegmentation results so that the shapes of all regions match the ground truth better. Finally, a Wishart-based maximum likelihood, based on regions, is used to obtain a classification map. Real polarimetric images are used in experiments. Compared with the other three frequently used methods, higher accuracy is observed, and classification maps are in better agreement with the initial ground maps, using the proposed method.