  Radar (SAR) images often exhibit profound appearance variations due to a
variety of factors including clutter noise produced by the coherent nature of
the illumination. Ultrasound images and infrared images have similar cluttered
appearance, that make 1 dimensional structures, as edges and object boundaries
difficult to locate. Structure information is usually extracted in two steps:
first, building and edge strength mask classifying pixels as edge points by
hypothesis testing, and secondly estimating from that mask, pixel wide
connected edges. With constant false alarm rate (CFAR) edge strength detectors
for speckle clutter, the image needs to be scanned by a sliding window composed
of several differently oriented splitting sub-windows. The accuracy of edge
location for these ratio detectors depends strongly on the orientation of the
sub-windows. In this work we propose to transform the edge strength detection
problem into a binary segmentation problem in the undecimated wavelet domain,
solvable using parallel 1d Hidden Markov Models. For general dependency models,
exact estimation of the state map becomes computationally complex, but in our
model, exact MAP is feasible. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated
on simulated noisy real-life natural images with available ground truth, while
the strength of our output edge map is measured with Pratt's, Baddeley an Kappa
proficiency measures. Finally, analysis and experiments on three different
types of SAR images, with different polarizations, resolutions and textures,
illustrate that the proposed method can detect structure on SAR images
effectively, providing a very good start point for active contour methods.
