A new hybrid algorithm for speckle noise reduction of SAR images based on mean-median filter and SRAD method

Abstract

One of the inherent characteristics of radar images is the presence of speckle noise. Speckle appears as a grainy texture in the image and highly reduces the image quality. Therefore, it is desirable to reduce speckle, prior to any image interpretation. With regard to the importance of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images, a lot of efforts have already been made to remove speckle noise from radar images, and accordingly famous filters have been introduced, each with their special advantages and disadvantages. In this paper, we examine five methods like the ones in the field of space and frequency domain. we will compare five different approaches: Wavelet Thresholding methods, anisotropic diffusion and speckle reducing anisotropic diffusion, also we suggest a method for reducing speckle of synthetic aperture radar images which is in fact a combination of hybrid mean-median filter and the method of speckle reducing anisotropic diffusion. The results indicate that the performance of our proposed method, based on criteria such as PSNR, improving SNR, standard protect the edge (β), in almost all cases is better the other compared methods; and it also offers more desirable results from the point of visual quality.