A new technique that combines maximum variance method and morphology was presented for Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image segmentation in target detection. Firstly, using the first-order differential method to enhance the original image for highlighting edge details of the image; then using the maximum variance method to calculate the gray threshold and segment the image; lastly, the mathematical morphology was used to processing the segmented image, which could prominently improve the segmentation effects. Experiments show that this algorithm can obtain accurate segmentation results, and have a good effect on noise suppression, edge detail protection and operation time.
