Unsupervised Segmentation of SAR Images Using Gaussian Mixture-Hidden Evidential Markov Fields

Hidden Markov fields have been extensively applied in the field of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image processing, mainly for segmentation and change detection. In such models, the hidden process of interest X is assumed to be a Markov field that is to be searched from an observable process Y. The possibility of such estimation lies, however, on several assumptions that turn out to be unsuitable for many natural systems. These models have then been extended in many directions, leading to triplet Markov fields among other extensions. A link has then been established between these models and the theory of evidence, opening new possibilities of uncertainty modeling and information fusion. The aim of this letter is to further generalize the hidden evidential Markov field (EMF) to consider more general forms of noise with application to unsupervised segmentation of SAR images. For parameters estimation, we use iterative conditional estimation, whereas maximization is performed through iterative conditional mode. The performance of the proposed model is assessed against the original EMF on real SAR images.