Abstract:This paper proposes an unsupervised approach for detecting regions of interest (ROI) based on the K multiplicative model (KMM) and superpixel segmentation in SAR imagery. KMM, with method of moments parameter estimation, mainly aims at detecting the darkcontain ROI on the sea surface. And the superpixelbased segmentation accomplishes edge extraction of ROI through clustering superpixels of ROI. The approach in this paper significantly outperforms adherence to boundary, achieving the error rate of less than 10% for airborne SAR imagery, and less than 2% for TerraSAR imagery. This approach also performs well in the computational efficiency, processing 104 pixels in 0.53 seconds on average. Experiments, accomplished by resorting to high resolution of the Lband airborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data and the TerraSARX data, demonstrate strong robustness and high effectiveness based on the proposed approach.