Undecimated wavelet based speckle reduction for SAR images

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images are inherently affected by multiplicative speckle noise, which is due to the coherent nature of scattering phenomena. This paper proposes a novel filtering method for removing such speckle noise from Synthetic Aperture Radar image, that combines the Stationary Wavelet Transform (SWT) with a mean based smoothing operation, which adapts to variation in both signal and the noise. Experimental results on several test images by using the proposed method show that, the proposed method yields significantly superior image quality and better Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR). In order to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm this method is compared with other wavelet based thresholding techniques and conventional statistical filters.