Speckle reduction for multi-polarimetric SAR image with the similarity of the scattering
Xuezhi Yang, Zuo Mei-xia, LANG Wenhui, Xi Zhang, Junmin Meng · National Remote Sensing Bulletin · 2012
The speckle in polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image has seriously affected the effectiveness in ex- tracting information. For this reason, a novel method based on the similarity of the scattering for speckle reduction is proposed. This method combines the similarity of the scattering properties and the redundant information in SAR image, and applies the Wishart distribution of SAR data to implement the measurement of the similarity. It then averages the covariance matrices with the weights according to the similarity between the matrices, leading to efficient reduction of the speckle in SAR image. The method processes each element of the covariance matrices, given its advantage in preserving polarimetric properties. Compared with the existing methods, including the Polarimetric Whitening Filter (PWF) and the polarimetric Lee filter, the implementation result indicates that the proposed algorithm is effective in improving the performance of despeckling and details preservation.