One-class SVM based segmentation for SAR image

Abstract

Image segmentation is of great importance in the field of image processing. A wide variety of approaches have been proposed for image segmentation. However, SAR image segmentation poses a difficult challenge owing to the high levels of speckle noise. In this paper, we proposed a SAR image segmentation method based on one-class support vector machines (SVM) to solve this problem. One-class SVM and two-class SVM for segmentation is discussed. One-class way is a kind of unsupervised learning, and one-class SVM based segmentation method reduces greatly human interactions, while yielding good segmentation results compared to two-class SVM based segmentation method. The segmentation results based on SVM are also compared to threshold method and adaptive threshold method. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method works well for image segmentation while reducing the speckle noise. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.