PolSAR Image Classification Based on Robust Low-Rank Feature Extraction and Markov Random Field

Polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) image classification has been investigated vigorously in various remote sensing applications. However, it is still a challenging task nowadays. One significant barrier lies in the speckle effect embedded in the PolSAR imaging process, which greatly degrades the quality of the images and further complicates the classification. To this end, we present a novel PolSAR image classification method that removes speckle noise via low-rank (LR) feature extraction and enforces smoothness priors via the Markov random field (MRF). Especially, we employ the mixture of Gaussian-based robust LR matrix factorization to simultaneously extract discriminative features and remove complex noises. Then, a classification map is obtained by applying a convolutional neural network with data augmentation on the extracted features, where local consistency is implicitly involved, and the insufficient label issue is alleviated. Finally, we refine the classification map by MRF to enforce contextual smoothness. We conduct experiments on two benchmark PolSAR data sets. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method achieves promising classification performance and preferable spatial consistency.

Automated summary

This paper proposes a novel PolSAR image classification method that removes speckle noise through low-rank feature extraction and enforces smoothness priors via the Markov random field. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves promising classification performance and preferable spatial consistency.