A filter for homogeneous areas in very high resolution SAR images based on hysteresis smoothing

Hysteresis smoothing is a filtering method for one-dimensional data, which removes waveform noise with a simple but powerful process. Although it may be applied in two-dimensional data, an inherent problem of severe artifacts makes it difficult to use this method on SAR imagery. In this paper, we take notice of a property appeared when hysteresis smoothing works well on homogeneous areas. We propose a simple rule to exploit this advantage without losing the merits of the original approach. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated quantitatively and qualitatively with simulated and real Ku-band SAR data.