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<front>
<journal-meta>
<journal-id journal-id-type="publisher">ISPRS-Annals</journal-id>
<journal-title-group>
<journal-title>ISPRS Annals of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences</journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="publisher">ISPRS-Annals</abbrev-journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="nlm-ta">ISPRS Ann. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spatial Inf. Sci.</abbrev-journal-title>
</journal-title-group>
<issn pub-type="epub">2194-9050</issn>
<publisher><publisher-name>Copernicus Publications</publisher-name>
<publisher-loc>Göttingen, Germany</publisher-loc>
</publisher>
</journal-meta>
<article-meta>
<article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.5194/isprs-annals-XI-M-1-2026-11-2026</article-id>
<title-group>
<article-title>Automatic Segmentation of SAR imagery Using Mixture Models</article-title>
</title-group>
<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Jafari</surname>
<given-names>Zahra</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Bobby</surname>
<given-names>Pradeep</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Taylor</surname>
<given-names>Rocky</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Karami</surname>
<given-names>Ebrahim</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6909-0102</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
</contrib-group><aff id="aff1">
<label>1</label>
<addr-line>Faculty of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Memorial University, St. John’s, NL A1B 3X7, Canada</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff2">
<label>2</label>
<addr-line>C-CORE, St. John’s, NL A1B 3X5, Canada</addr-line>
</aff>
<pub-date pub-type="epub">
<day>02</day>
<month>07</month>
<year>2026</year>
</pub-date>
<volume>XI-M-1-2026</volume>
<fpage>11</fpage>
<lpage>20</lpage>
<permissions>
<copyright-statement>Copyright: &#x000a9; 2026 Zahra Jafari et al.</copyright-statement>
<copyright-year>2026</copyright-year>
<license license-type="open-access">
<license-p>This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit <ext-link ext-link-type="uri"  xlink:href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/</ext-link></license-p>
</license>
</permissions>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/XI-M-1-2026/11/2026/isprs-annals-XI-M-1-2026-11-2026.html">This article is available from https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/XI-M-1-2026/11/2026/isprs-annals-XI-M-1-2026-11-2026.html</self-uri>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/XI-M-1-2026/11/2026/isprs-annals-XI-M-1-2026-11-2026.pdf">The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/XI-M-1-2026/11/2026/isprs-annals-XI-M-1-2026-11-2026.pdf</self-uri>
<abstract>
<p>Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image segmentation underpins target detection, land cover classification, and environmental monitoring, yet remains challenging due to speckle, non-Gaussian backscatter statistics, and outliers. This paper presents a comparative evaluation of mixture-model&amp;ndash;based segmentation tailored to SAR, with a focus on Radarsat Constellation Mission (RCM) imagery. We propose a segmentation algorithm that selects one of three statistical mixture models&amp;mdash;Rayleigh, Gamma, or Lognormal&amp;mdash;to model SAR backscatter and produce soft (posterior) segmentations, followed by posterior thresholding and optional MRF‑ICM post‑processing to enhance spatial coherence and suppress speckle-induced errors. We compare against standard operational approaches, threshold-based methods (CFAR, multi-threshold Otsu) and conventional mixture-model labeling that designates the largest-scale component as the target.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;On RCM data, the Rayleigh Mixture Model (RMM) is the strongest: at target pixels, the posterior probability of the largest-mean component is typically very close to 1, allowing a single Rayleigh component to capture the main body of the iceberg reliably. Unlike threshold-based baselines that yield hard segmentations, our Mixture Model (MM) approach outputs soft posteriors, enabling principled HH/HV fusion and downstream machine learning (ML). These results underscore the promise of RMM for robust iceberg detection; future work will integrate Rayleigh-based posterior features with lightweight ML classifiers to further improve performance across sensors and conditions.</p>
</abstract>
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