Joint despeckling and edge detection of SAR images based on the Mumford-Shah functional

In this paper, we propose a joint despeckling and edge detection algorithm based on the Mumford-Shah functional, which accomplishes the image filtering and segmentation as a result of an analytical variational problem. This approach turns out to be well suited to jointly despeckle and segment SAR image data; the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed technique yields high quality despeckling without impairing critical image features and with the additional advantage to provide a detailed edge map