Unsupervised classification of polarimetric SAR data using graph cut optimization

Abstract—The paper presents a new framework for the classification of polarimetric SAR data. The underlying model introduces cyclic conditional dependencies among the class labels assigned to neighboring observations as a mechanism to regulate the spatial homogeneity of classification results. Classification is posed as an inference problem, and is solved by coherently integrating expectation maximization and graph cut optimization. Results based on real SAR data are presented. I