Abstract:

By analyzing the scattering property of the synthetic aperture radar(SAR) images, a power transformation Otsu segmentation algorithm for SAR images is proposed, which can be applied in the preprocessing step of SAR automatic target recognition. Firstly, a speckle suppression method for SAR images is applied to improve the coherence of the amplitude in the background region and the target region using adjacent pixels. Secondly, the adaptive power transformation is employed to the filtered SAR images to enhance the coherence of the amplitude in the target region furthermore. At last, the original Otsu method is adopted to segment the transformed SAR images. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm provides satisfactory segmentation results for SAR images with different amplitude distribution properties. In addition, the proposed method has low computation burden, which benefits the practical applications.