title: Minimum description length synthetic aperture radar image segmentation.
abstract: We present a new minimum description length (MDL) approach based on a deformable partition--a polygonal grid--for automatic segmentation of a speckled image composed of several homogeneous regions. The image segmentation thus consists in the estimation of the polygonal grid, or, more precisely, its number of regions, its number of nodes and the location of its nodes. These estimations are performed by minimizing a unique MDL criterion which takes into account the probabilistic properties of speckle fluctuations and a measure of the stochastic complexity of the polygonal grid. This approach then leads to a global MDL criterion without an undetermined parameter since no other regularization term than the stochastic complexity of the polygonal grid is necessary and noise parameters can be estimated with maximum likelihood-like approaches. The performance of this technique is illustrated on synthetic and real synthetic aperture radar images of agricultural regions and the influence of different terms of the model is analyzed.
authors.affiliation: Physics and Image Processing Group, Fresnel Institute UMR CNRS 6133, Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Physique de Marseille, Domaine universitaire de St Jerome, 13397 Marseille Cedex 20, France.
authors.forename: Frédéric
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Galland
authors.forename: Nicolas
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Bertaux
authors.forename: Philippe
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Réfrégier