Method of SAR image despeckling based on local adaptive processing

Speckle noise in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images is generated by the coherent processing of radar images, it severely affects the image quality. So the study of de-speckling the SAR images is an important task in SAR image processing. An improved SAR image de-speckling algorithm based on the local adaptive processing is proposed. The algorithm automatically adjusts the size of the filter window according to distributed characteristic of local pixel. The window size is augmented in the homogeneous area to suppress speckle noises. While in a specific area that contains targets the window size is reduced and at the same time partial pixels within a certain adaptive threshold are selected to be used in filtering process. This procedure has the advantages of effectively reducing the speckle noise and keeping both edge and target detail. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.