SUMMARY
A method of supervised characterisation of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite imageshas been discussed in which simple object shape features of satellite images have been usedto classify and describe the terrain types. This scheme is based on a multilevel approach inwhich objects of interest are first segmented out from the image and subsequently characterisedbased on their shape features. Once all objects have been characterised, the entire image canbe characterised. Emphasis has been laid on the hierarchical information extraction from theimage which enables greater flexibility in characterising the image and is not restricted to mereclassification. The paper also describes a method for giving relative importance among features,i.e., to give more weights to those features that are better than others in distinguishing betweencompeting classes. A method of comparing two SAR sensor images based on terrain elementspresent in the images has also been described here.