AIR-PolSAR-Seg: A Large-Scale Data Set for Terrain Segmentation in Complex-Scene PolSAR Images

Abstract

Polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) terrain segmentation is a fundamental research topic in PolSAR image interpretation. Recently, many studies have been investigated to handle this task. However, the existing data for PolSAR terrain segmentation have relatively limited scale and their scene complexity is relatively simple. These issues greatly restrict the development of algorithms. Therefore, there is a strong requirement for establishing a large-scale data set for terrain segmentation in complex-scene PolSAR images. In this paper, we present a benchmark data set containing a PolSAR amplitude image with a 9082×9805-pixel region and 2000 image patches with a size of 512×512 for PolSAR terrain segmentation, which is called AIR-PolSAR-Seg. We collect the PolSAR image with a resolution of 8 m from the GaoFen-3 satellite, and it is equipped with pixel-wise annotation which covers six categories. Compared with the previous data resources, AIR-PolSAR-Seg preserves some specific properties. First, AIR-PolSAR-Seg owns a large-size PolSAR image and provides a large quantity of image patches. It offers the research community a complete data resource with adequate training examples and reliable validation results. Second, AIR-PolSAR-Seg is established upon a PolSAR image with high scene complexity. This characteristic motivates robust and advanced segmentation approaches to facilitate complex-scene PolSAR image analysis. Based on AIR-PolSAR-Seg, three tasks are introduced: multi-category segmentation, water body segmentation, and building segmentation. Moreover, a performance analysis of traditional approaches and deep learning-based approaches are conducted, which can be regarded as baselines and provide references for future research.

Keywords

• Benchmark data set
• polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR)
• terrain segmentation