Despeckling of Oil Spill SAR Images using Fusion Technique

Abstract

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) oil spill images are corrupted by speckle noise due to random interference of electromagnetic waves. The speckle degrades the quality of the oil spill images and makes interpretations, analysis and classifications of SAR images harder. Therefore, some speckle mitigation is necessary prior to the processing of SAR oil spill images. In this paper, some basic speckle reduction filters like Kuan, Lee, Frost, antistrophic diffusion and SRAD filters are used. A New method is proposed for despeckling of SAR oil spill images which combines the frost filter with relaxed median filter. The proposed method gives better results when compared to other methods in terms of statistical parameters like PSNR, MSE, energy and entropy value. The approach can also reduce the computing time compared with other approaches.