SAR image despeckling via bilateral filtering

Bilateral filtering (BF) can realise both smoothing images and preserving edges, whereas its filtering results are always influenced since its two parameters are difficult to configure to the optimum. In this reported work, the application of BF is extended to synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image despeckling, and the despeckling evaluation indexes, including the equivalent number of looks and the edge save index, are used to estimate the parameters. After BF with estimated parameters imposed on a normalised SAR image, further processing can achieve both despeckling and edge preservation simultaneously. Experimental results show that the visual quality and evaluation indexes of the proposed algorithm outperform the classical Lee filtering.