ICA based speckle filtering for target extraction in SAR images using adaptive space separation

A novel approach based on independent component analysis (ICA) for speckle filtering and target extraction of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images is proposed using adaptive space separation with weighted information entropy (WIE) incorporated. First the basis and the independent components are respectively obtained by ICA technique, and WIE of the image is computed; then based on the threshold computed from function T-WIE (threshold versus weighted-information-entropy), independent components are adaptively separated and the bases are classified accordingly. Thus, the image space is separated into two subspaces: "clean" and "noise". Then, a proposed nonlinear operator ABO is applied on each component of the 'clean' subspace for further optimization. Finally, recovery image is obtained reconstructing this subspace and target is easily extracted with binarisation. Note that here T-WIE is an interpolated function based on several representative target SAR images using proposed space separation algorithm.