Edge detection for polarimetric SAR images combining adaptive optimal polarimetric contrast enhancement and ROA operator

Aiming at improving the utilization of polarimetric information, a new edge detector for polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) images based on the adaptive optimal polarimetric contrast enhancement (OPCE) and the ratio of averaging (ROA) was proposed in this paper. In the moving window, firstly, the transmitting and receiving polarizations are calculated to optimize the contrast of targets beside the assumed edge. Secondly, the ROA algorithm is applied to detect edges. Furthermore, a fast version was proposed reducing the computation greatly. The optimal polarization is adaptive to window location and edge templates. Therefore the new method is robust. The utilization of optimal polarisation helps reduce the missing rate, enhance the continuity of detected edges, and decrease the false edge rate. Experimental results of the simulated and the real PolSAR data both revealed that the new detector is better than the traditional methods.