Power Transmission Tower Series Extraction in PolSAR Image Based on Time-Frequency Analysis and A-Contrario Theory

Based on Time-Frequency (TF) analysis and a-contrario theory, this paper presents a new approach for extraction of linear arranged power transmission tower series in Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (PolSAR) images. Firstly, the PolSAR multidimensional information is analyzed using a linear TF decomposition approach. The stationarity of each pixel is assessed by testing the maximum likelihood ratio statistics of the coherency matrix. Then, based on the maximum likelihood log-ratio image, a Cell-Averaging Constant False Alarm Rate (CA-CFAR) detector with Weibull clutter background and a post-processing operator is used to detect point-like targets in the image. Finally, a searching approach based on a-contrario theory is applied to extract the linear arranged targets from detected point-like targets. The experimental results on three sets of PolSAR data verify the effectiveness of this approach.