Filament preserving model (FPM) segmentation applied to SAR sea-ice imagery

Modeling spatial context constraints using a Markov random field (MRF) has been widely used in the segmentation of noisy images. Its applicability to synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sea-ice segmentation has also been demonstrated recently. However, most existing MRF models are not capable of preserving filaments, specifically leads and ridges for SAR sea ice, which are valuable for ship navigation applications and necessary for identifying certain ice types. In this paper, a new statistical context model is proposed that, within the same scene, can simultaneously preserve narrow elongated features while producing similar smooth segmentation results comparable to typical MRF-based approaches. Tested on one synthetic image and two SAR sea-ice scenes, this filament preserving model substantially improves classification accuracies when compared to standard Gaussian mixture and MRF-based segmentation algorithms.