Spatially Variant Restoration for Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar Imagery

A. spatially variant speckle filter is proposed for multi-look polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (POLSAR) imagery. The central idea is that the filtering is applied only to homogeneous areas based on the scattering properties, while for detected edges, lines and point-like textural features, the original complex covariance matrix of these features is restored in order to preserve the actual features. The capabilities of the proposed filter were examined using nine-look NASA/JPL POLSAR C-band data. Based on the obtained results, the proposed filter showed a promising performance in speckle removal and radiometric preservation. Moreover, the point-like textural features as well as structural features (i.e. edges and lines) were well-retained in the filtered outputs.