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

Kurzfassung

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 times 200 pixels) extracted from SLC HR TerraSAR-X scenes.