Speckle Suppression for SAR Images Based on Adaptive Shrinkage in Contourlet Domain

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image is usually contaminated by speckle noise due to random interference of electromagnetic waves. To effectively solve this problem, a novel speckle suppression algorithm for SAR image was proposed. The algorithm combines the multiscale geometric analysis tool: contourlet transform and an improved adaptive shrinkage denoising algorithm. The Monte-Carlo simulation is incorporated to estimate the statistical properties of contourlet coefficients. To improve the visual quality of despeckling, the cycle-spinning technique is also utilized. Experimental results show that compared with conventional wavelet despeckling algorithm, the proposed algorithm can achieve better speckle suppression results, and the significant information of original image like textures and contour details is well maintained