Improved edge enhancing diffusion filter for speckle-corrupted images

In the context of automatic image processing, the noise nearly always represents the hardest problem to cope with. This is particularly true on images corrupted by multiplicative speckle noise, such as Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images. To tackle such an issue, this paper proposes a novel anisotropic diffusion filter that manages to fulfill simultaneously two competing requirements: noise reduction on homogeneous regions and edge enhancement. To prove the capabilities of our filter, we compare it to two non-local diffusion (NLD) filters applied on Lena image corrupted by a multiplicative speckle noise and on a real SAR image acquired by the COSMO-SkyMed (CSK) satellite constellation.