A new method for speckle reduction in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images using optimal window size

Abstract

Speckle degrades the radiometric quality of a Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image and makes its visual interpretation difficult. The approaches proposed previously for speckle filtering of SAR images exploit a window of fixed size for this purpose. But a fixed size window is not sufficient as the size of objects may vary throughout the image. In this paper, a method is introduced by which each pixel in the image is filtered using a window size which is optimal for that pixel. Real and imaginary parts of a single-channel SAR image are used for the selection of the best window size for each pixel, and then intensity image is filtered by applying that window size. The Average and Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE) filters are modified using the Adaptive Window Size method. This approach is implemented on the HH-channel of a RADARSAT-2 image acquired over the Avalon Peninsula near St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada. This filter can supress speckle effectively while retaining the details reasonably.