Fisher Vectors for PolSAR Image Classification

Abstract

In this letter, we study the application of the Fisher vector (FV) to the problem of pixelwise supervised classification of polarimetric synthetic aperture radar images. This is a challenging problem since information in those images is encoded as complex-valued covariance matrices. We observe that the real parts of these matrices preserve the positive semidefiniteness property of their complex counterpart. Based on this observation, we derive an FV from a mixture of real Wishart densities and integrate it with a Potts-like energy model in order to capture spatial dependencies between neighboring regions. Experimental results on two challenging data sets show the effectiveness of the approach.