An improved local statistics filter for denoising of SAR images

Abstract

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is an active remote sensing system which is utilized for producing high-resolution images. But due to backscattering of microwave signals, these images get contaminated with speckle noise. This paper proposes an improved local statistics filter for filtering the speckle noise from the SAR images. The proposed filter is a combination of mean and hybrid median filters, employing a novel 7x7 filtering template. The performance of the proposed filter is tested against the standard Hybrid Median filters for which the evaluated values show better performs in terms of PSNR (in dB) and SSI.