Speckle filtering of SAR images based on adaptive windowing

Abstract

Speckle noise usually occurs in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images owing to coherent processing of SAR data. The most well-known image domain speckle filters are the adaptive filters using local statistics such as mean and standard deviation. The local statistics filters adapt the filter coefficients based on data within a fixed running window. In these schemes, depending on the window size, there exists trade-off between the extent of speckle noise suppression and the capability of preserving fine details. The authors propose a new adaptive windowing algorithm for speckle noise suppression which solves the problem of window size associated with the local statistics adaptive filters. In the algorithm, the window size is automatically adjusted depending on regional characteristics to suppress speckle noise as much as possible while preserving fine details. Speckle noise suppression gets stronger in homogeneous regions as the window size increases succeedingly. In fine detail regions, by reducing the window size successively, edges and textures are preserved. The fixed-window filtering schemes and the proposed one are applied to both a simulated SAR image and an ERS-1 SAR image to demonstrate the excellent performance of the proposed adaptive windowing algorithm for speckle noise.