@ARTICLE\{IMM2003-01224, author = "J. Schou and H. Skriver and A. A. Nielsen and K. Conradsen", title = "{CFAR} edge detector for polarimetric {SAR} images", year = "2003", month = "jan", keywords = "complex Wishart distribution, edge detection, polarimetry, synthetic aperture radar (SAR), Wishart likelihood-ratio test statistic.", pages = "20-32", journal = "{IEEE} Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing", volume = "41", editor = "", number = "1", publisher = "", url = "http://ieeexplore.ieee.org", abstract = "Finding the edges between different regions in an image is one of the fundamental steps of image analysis, and several edge detectors suitable for the special statistics of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) intensity images have previously been developed. In this paper, a new edge detector for polarimetric {SAR} images is presented using a newly developed test statistic in the complex Wishart distribution to test for equality of covariance matrices. The new edge detector can be applied to a wide range of {SAR} data from single-channel intensity data to multifrequency and/or multitemporal polarimetric {SAR} data. By simply changing the parameters characterizing the test statistic according to the applied {SAR} data, constant false-alarm rate detection is always obtained. An adaptive filtering scheme is presented, and the distributions of the detector are verified using simulated polarimetric {SAR} images. Using {SAR} data from the Danish airborne polarimetric {SAR,} {EMISAR,} it is demonstrated that superior edge detection results are obtained using polarimetric and/or multifrequency data compared to using only intensity data.", isbn_issn = "DOI:10.1109/TGRS.2002.808063" }