Nonlocal-Lee filter for SAR image despeckling based on hybrid patch similarity

This paper presents a novel nonlocal Lee (NL-Lee) filter based on both structure similarity and homogeneity similarity, namely hybrid patch similarity, which can effectively enhance the patch regularity assumption. The proposed NL-Lee filter shares the framework of the NLM filter but combines the traditional Lee filter in a distributive way. Structure similarity from the NLM filter and homogeneity similarity from the Lee filter are well balanced in the new filter. As a result, the new NL-Lee filter obtains good trade-off between speckle smoothing and detail preservation and leads to state-of-the-art results.