SAR image segmentation via non-local active contours

This paper presents a method for SAR image segmentation by relying on active contour model with the non-local processing principle [1]. The idea is to partition a SAR image via computing the patch similarity in the SAR image non-locally, and formulize the segmentation problem with an active contour model. More precisely, after computing the statistical features of SAR images, non-local comparisons between feature patches are used to calculate the active contour energy, which is defined by integrating the interactions between pairs of patches inside and outside the segmented region. A level set method is finally used to minimize the non-local energy. Compared with existing approaches for SAR image segmentation, the only requirement of this method is a local similarity between patches, and it is less sensitive to initial segmentation. The experimental results show the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed method.