An improved watershed-based SAR image segmentation algorithm
Shuang Wang, Xiaojing Zhang, Licheng Jiao, Xiangrong Zhang · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2009
The watershed transform is a well-established tool for image segmentation. However, watershed segmentation is often not effective for Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images which are generally corrupted by coherent speckle noise. This paper presents a novel approach for SAR image segmentation using watershed segmentation algorithm combined with Otsu. The aim of this study is to improve the generalization of watershed techniques and to construct a well segmentation of SAR images. Typically, Otsu is used to produce inner mark and external mark. Then we use the mark to modify the gradient image of the SAR image. Additionally, rather than flooding the gradient image, we use the gradient image modified by the mark as input to the watershed algorithm. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of the improved watershed-based SAR segmentation.