A novel and fast corner detection method for SAR imagery

Abstract

Corners play an important role on image processing, while it is difficult to detect reliable and repeatable corners in SAR images due to the complex property of SAR sensors. In this paper, we propose a fast and novel corner detection method for SAR imagery. First, a local processing window is constructed for each point. We use the local mean of a 3 × 3 mask to represent a single point, which is weighted by a Gaussian template. Then the candidate point is compared with 16 surrounding points in the processing window. Considering the multiplicative property of speckle noise, the similarity measure between the center point and the surrounding points is calculated by the ratio of their local means. If there exist more than M continuous points are different from the center point, then the candidate point is labelled as a corner point. Finally, a selection strategy is implemented by ranking the corner score and employing the non-maxima suppression method. Extreme situations such as isolated bright points are also removed. Experimental results on both simulated and real-world SAR images show that the proposed detector has a high repeatability and a low localization error, compared with other state-of-the-art detectors.