Publications
Shadow Probability of Detection and False Alarm for Median-Filtered SAR Imagery
Median filtering reduces speckle in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery while preserving edges, at the expense of coarsening the resolution, by replacing the center pixel of a sliding window by the median value. For shadow detection, this approach helps distinguish shadows from clutter more easily, while preserving shadow shape delineations. However, the nonlinear operation alters the shadow and clutter distributions and statistics, which must be taken into consideration when computing probability of detection and false alarm metrics. Depending on system parameters, median filtering can improve probability of detection and false alarm by orders of magnitude. Herein, we examine shadow probability of detection and false alarm in a homogeneous, ideal clutter background after median filter post-processing. Some comments on multi-look processing effects with and without median filtering are also made.