Pvn. Rao et al., AN ADAPTIVE FILTER FOR SPECKLE SUPPRESSION IN SYNTHETIC-APERTURE RADAR IMAGES, International journal of remote sensing, 16(5), 1995, pp. 877-889
Synthetic aperture radar images are generally corrupted by speckle noi
se. This arises due to the coherent nature of radar echoes used in the
image formation and it is often necessary to enhance the image by spe
ckle suppression before data can be used in various applications. To s
uppress speckle and improve the radar image interpretability a simple
filtering technique has been proposed. The filter is adaptive to the v
ariance of pixel intensity in a sliding window and accordingly decides
the number of nearest neighbours to the central pixel to replace its
intensity with the average intensity of those nearest neighbours. The
performance of the filter has been studied for speckle removal in the
homogeneous areas and its edge retention capability and compared with
some of the widely known speckle filters. The results show that the pr
oposed filter retains edges, removes speckle noise and compares well w
ith other known filters in the literature.