Fisher Vectors for PolSAR Image Classification

Abstract

In this letter we study the application of the Fisher Vector (FV) to the problem of pixel-wise supervised classification of PolSAR images. This is a challenging problem since information in those images is encoded as complex-valued covariance matrices. We observe that the real part of these matrices preserve the positive semidefiniteness property of their complex counterpart. Based on this observation, we derive a FV from a mixture of real Wishart pdfs and integrate it with a Potts-like energy model in order to capture spatial dependencies between neighboring regions. Experimental results on two challenging datasets show the effectiveness of the approach.