Comparisons of speckle noise filtering methods on high resolution SAR image

Numerous image processing methods to suppress the speckle noise in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) have been proposed. There is always a tradeoff between smoothing out speckle and preserving the useful spatial information (i.e. edge, texture). This paper proposed a novel index by integrating the evaluation of both speckle and edge preservation to evaluate the balance of the aforementioned two criteria. Some of the well-known adaptive speckle suppression filters are then compared and evaluated using two high resolution SAR datasets on heterogeneous areas. Experimental result shows that Kuan filter performance better in preserving image sharpness and detail while suppressing noise.