SAR Image Categorization With Log Cumulants of the Fractional Fourier Transform Coefficients

With the advent of high-resolution (HR) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images from satellites like TerraSAR-X and TanDEM-X, interest is now on patch-oriented image categorization in contrast to the pixel-based classification in low-resolution SAR images. SAR image categorization requires the generation of a compact feature descriptor that accurately defines the content of the image patch under consideration. As phase information plays a critical role in SAR images, this paper proposes the use of a chirplet-derived transform, i.e., the fractional Fourier transform (FrFT), for generating a compact feature descriptor for single-look complex (SLC) SAR images. Representing a SAR signal in rotated joint time-frequency planes via the FrFT allows discovering the underlying backscattering phenomenon of the objects on the ground. SAR image projections on different planes of the joint time-frequency space using the FrFT provide a simple statistical response that is easier to analyze. The proposed method has been compared with a multiscale approach, i.e., Gabor filter banks, a second-order-statistics-based method (as gray-level co-occurrence matrices), and a spectral descriptor method. We demonstrate the suitability of the FrFT-based method for image categorization on the basis of backscattering behavior, whereas the Gabor-filter-bank-based method is found mainly suitable for images with a strong texture. This paper demonstrates enhancement in the separability for most of the considered categories when using logarithmic cumulants instead of linear moments for both the FrFT-based and Gabor-filter-bank-based methods. The experimental database consists of 2000 image patches (of size 200 × 200 pixels) extracted from SLC HR TerraSAR-X scenes.