Speckle Suppression in SAR Images Using the 2-D GARCH Model

A novel Bayesian-based speckle suppression method for Synthetic Aperture Radar ( SAR) images is presented that preserves the structural features and textural information of the scene. First, the logarithmic transform of the original image is analyzed into the multiscale wavelet domain. We show that the wavelet coefficients of SAR images have significantly non-Gaussian statistics that are best described by the 2-D GARCH model. By using the 2-D GARCH model on the wavelet coefficients, we are capable of taking into account important characteristics of wavelet coefficients, such as heavy tailed marginal distribution and the dependencies between the coefficients. Furthermore, we use a maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimator for estimating the clean image wavelet coefficients. Finally, we compare our proposed method with various speckle suppression methods applied on synthetic and actual SAR images and we verify the performance improvement in utilizing the new strategy.