Multiscale edge detection for SAR image despeckling

This paper presents a technique for speckle reduction in SAR images by using the Standard deviation of Squared Amplitude method (SSA) in the Mallat wavelet transform. The edge and non-edge regions can be detected from the SSA. Applied by this technique, the large wavelet coefficients generated by edge region and the speckle noise in small wavelet coefficient or non-edge region are then removed by using various filtering in all high-frequency bands. The despeckled image is obtained by reconstruction from the filtered coefficients. By means of evaluating the proposed method, the experiment has conducted using SAR images from JERS-1 satellite. The experimental result shows that the proposed method gives a significant noise removal and preserves the sharp features of the images, as well as visual appearance quality.