Saliency and salient region detection in SAR polarimetry

Effective feature extraction is the basis of every approach to automated image analysis. An important class of extraction operators, point and region of interest detectors, has not yet been developed for SAR Polarimetry. This paper describes a region of interest operator designed to identify distinctive regions in a scale invariant fashion. The work presented includes a novel definition of image entropy, in the information theoretical sense, for polarimetric SAR image content, its well as a rigorous statistical analysis of the operators scale selection mechanism. This analysis establishes the ability to identify a region irrespective of its size. The results presented include the application of the operator to real data and demonstrations of the operators scale invariance.