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As the first major step in each object-oriented feature extraction approach, segmentation plays an essential role as a preliminary step towards further and higher levels of image processing. The primary objective of this paper is to illustrate the potential of Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (PolSAR) features extracted from Compact Polarimetry (CP) SAR data for image segmentation using Markov Random Field (MRF). The proposed method takes advantage of both spectral and spatial information to segment the CP SAR data. In the first step of the proposed method, k-means clustering was applied to over-segment the image using the appropriate features optimally selected using Genetic Algorithm (GA). As a similarity criterion in each cluster, a probabilistic distance was used for an agglomerative hierarchical merging of small clusters into an appropriate number of larger clusters. In the agglomerative clustering approach, the estimation of the appropriate number of clusters using the data log-likelihood algorithm differs depending on the distance criterion used in the algorithm. In particular, the Wishart Chernoff distance which is independent of samples (pixels) tends to provide a higher appropriate number of clusters compared to the Wishart test statistic distance. This is because the Wishart Chernoff distance preserves detailed data information corresponding to small clusters. The probabilistic distance used in this study is Wishart Chernoff distance which evaluates the similarity of clusters by measuring the distance between their complex Wishart probability density functions. The output of this step, as the initial segmentation of the image, is applied to a Markov Random Field model to improve the final segmentation using vicinity information. The method combines Wishart clustering and enhanced initial clusters in order to access the posterior MRF energy function. The contextual image classifier adopts the Iterated Conditional Mode (ICM) approach to converge to a local minimum and represent a good trade-off between segmentation accuracy and computation burden. The results showed that the PolSAR features extracted from CP mode can provide an acceptable overall accuracy in segmentation when compared to the full polarimetry (FP) and Dual Polarimetry (DP) data. Moreover, the results indicated that the proposed algorithm is superior to the existing image segmentation techniques in terms of segmentation accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]