Discrimination of water from shadow regions on radar imagery using computer vision techniques

Unlike MSS LANDSAT imagery and other photography, the specific characteristics of the intensity of water and shadow reflectivity in SAR imagery make the task of discriminating between them extremely difficult. In this report, we analyze the mechanism of reflectivity of water and shadow on radar imagery and describe a scene-analysis system which consists of a texture-preserving noise-removal procedure as the preprocessing step, a probabilistic relaxation algorithm to do the low-level labeling, and a spatial reasoning procedure based on a relational model to perform the high-level interpretation. The experimental results obtained from the SAR images are presented to illustrate the performance of this system.