SAR image simulation for the assessment of despeckling techniques

We propose a new framework for the quantitative assessment of SAR despeckling techniques, based on physical-level simulation of SAR images corresponding to canonical scenes. Thanks to the simulator, we can generate multiple SAR images of the same scene which differ only in the speckle content, and, hence, a true multilook SAR image, with an arbitrarily large number of looks, to use as “speckle-free” reference. Based on this concept, we select a small set of canonical scenes and, for each of them, a suitable set of objective measures which account for speckle suppression and image feature preservation. We gain insight into the system reliability by comparing the indications it gives for some sample despeckling filters with those obtained by expert visual inspection of the filtered images.