Multiscale Unsupervised Segmentation of SAR Imagery Using the Genetic Algorithm

A valid unsupervised and multiscale segmentation of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery is proposed by a combination GA-EM of the Expectation Maximization (EM) algorith with the genetic algorithm (GA). The mixture multiscale autoregressive (MMAR) model is introduced to characterize and exploit the scale-to-scale statistical variations and statistical variations in the same scale in SAR imagery due to radar speckle, and a segmentation method is given by combining the GA algorithm with the EM algorithm. This algorithm is capable of selecting the number of components of the model using the minimum description length (MDL) criterion. Our approach benefits from the properties of the Genetic and the EM algorithm by combination of both into a single procedure. The population-based stochastic search of the genetic algorithm (GA) explores the search space more thoroughly than the EM method. Therefore, our algorithm enables escaping from local optimal solutions since the algorithm becomes less sensitive to its initialization. Some experiment results are given based on our proposed approach, and compared to that of the EM algorithms. The experiments on the SAR images show that the GA-EM outperforms the EM method.