The advantage of segmentation in SAR image compression

SAR images are severely degraded by speckle, and filtering is therefore a common practice. Filtering is especially useful before compression, to avoid spending valuable resources to represent noise; unfortunately, it also degrades important image features, like region boundaries. To overcome this problem, one can resort to a segmentation-based compression scheme, which allows one to preserve region boundaries, carry out intense denoising, and improve overall performance. In this work we assess the potential of segmentation-based compression through controlled experiments on synthetic SAR images. Numerical results seem to confirm the validity of this approach.