The Geodesic Distance between GI⁰ Models and its Application to Region Discrimination

The GI0distribution is able to characterize different regions in monopolarized SAR imagery. It is indexed by three parameters: the number of looks (which can be estimated in the whole image), a scale parameter, and a texture parameter. This paper presents a new proposal for feature extraction and region discrimination in SAR imagery, using the geodesic distance as a measure of dissimilarity between GI0models. We derive geodesic distances between models that describe several practical situations, assuming the number of looks known, for same and different texture and for same and different scale. We then apply this new tool to the problems of identifying edges between regions with different texture, and quantify the dissimilarity between pairs of samples in actual SAR data. We analyze the advantages of using the geodesic distance when compared to stochastic distances.