A new filter method for speckle reduction in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images

Conventional averaging of uncorrelated images of the same terrain to reduce speckle can be considered as filtering the image with a sinc-shaped filter. It is pointed out that this filter is poor in its spectral characteristics. A new filter with better characteristics, i.e., nearly flat passband and lower sidelobe-level is suggested. Examples are given to demonstrate the advantages of the new filter over the conventional one in terms of SNR (signal-to-noise ratio) improvement and spectral characteristics.<>