Detection of meso-micro scale surface features based on microcanonical multifractal formalism

Abstract

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is an effective tool to analyze the features of the ocean. In this paper, the microcanonical multifractal formalism is used to analyze SAR images to obtain meso-micro scale surface features. We use the Sobel operator to calculate the gradient of each point in the image, then operate continuous variable scale wavelet transform on this gradient matrix. The relationship between the wavelet coefficient and scale is built by linear regression. This relationship decides the singular exponents of every point in the image which contain local and global features. The manifolds in the ocean can be revealed by analyzing these exponents. The most singular manifold, which is related to the streamlines in the SAR images, can be obtained with a suitable threshold of the singular exponents. Experiments verify that application of the microcanonical multifractal formalism to SAR image analysis is effective for detecting the meso-micro scale surface information.