Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

This paper introduces a new framework for point target detection in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. We focus on the task of locating reflective small regions using a level set based algorithm. Unlike most of the approaches in image segmentation, we address an algorithm which incorporates speckle statistics instead of empirical parameters and also discards speckle filtering. The curve evolves according to speckle statistics, initially propagating with a maximum upward velocity in homogeneous areas. Our approach is validated by a series of tests on synthetic and real SAR images and compared with three other segmentation algorithms, demonstrating that it configures a novel and efficient method for target detection purpose.