Fast feature preserving despeckling

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images contain high amount of speckle noise which causes edge detection, shape analysis, classification, segmentation, change detection and target recognition tasks become more difficult. To overcome such difficulties, smoothing of homogenous regions while preserving point scatterers and edges during speckle reduction is quite important. Besides, due to huge size of SAR images in remote sensing applications efficiency of computational load and memory consumption must be further improved. In this paper, a parallel computational approach is proposed for the Feature Preserving Despeckling (FPD) method which is chosen due to its success in speckle reduction. Speckle reduction performance, execution time and memory consumption of the proposed Fast FPD (FFPD) method is shown using spot mode SAR images.