A noise-robust water segmentation method based on synthetic aperture radar images combined with automatic sample collection

ABSTRACT

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images have been widely used for surface water identification due to their all-weather capabilities. However, the presence of inherent speckle noise in SAR data poses a challenge for accurate water identification. Additionally, annotating high-quality water body samples requires significant human labour, which can be costly and time-consuming. Aiming at the above problems, a noise-robust automatic water identification architecture without artificial labels is proposed. First, a two-stage automatic sample collection method that utilizes k-means++ clustering and morphological concepts is designed. Then, a weakly supervised noise-resistant SAR water body segmentation method NRM-ACUNet has been developed based on U-Net combined with L_NR-Dice loss function and Conditionally Parameterized Convolutions (CondConv) to minimize the impact of sample noises. Experimental results show that the morphological processing can improve water body sample quality compared to k-means++, and compared with U-Net, NRM-ACUNet performs superior with noise-containing pseudo-samples, achieving 96.8% F1 accuracy and 52.06% accuracy improvement.

KEYWORDS:

• Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR)
• automatic sample collection
• water segmentation
• noise-robust
• weakly supervised

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The Plan of Science and Technology of Henan Province (232102211043, 222102110439), the Key Laboratory of Natural Resources Monitoring and Regulation in Southern Hilly Region, Ministry of Natural Resources of the People’s Republic of China (NRMSSHR-2022Z01), National Undergraduate Training Program for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (202210475111) and the Key Laboratory of Land Satellite Remote Sensing Application, Ministry of Natural Resources of the People’s Republic of China (KLSMNR-202302).