Speckle Noise Removal by Rank-ordered Differences Diffusion Filter
Chul-Soo Ye · National Remote Sensing Bulletin · 2009
The purposes of this paper are to present a selection method of neighboring pixels whose local statistics are similar to the center pixel and combine the selection result with mean curvature diffusion filter to reduce noises in remote sensed imagery. The order of selection of neighboring pixels is critical, especially for finding a pixel belonging to the homogeneous region, since the statistics of the homogeneous region vary according to the selection order. An effective strategy for selecting neighboring pixels, which uses rank-order differences vector obtained by computing the intensity differences between the center pixel and neighboring pixels and arranging them in ascending order, is proposed in this paper. By using region growing method, we divide the elements of the rank-ordered differences vector into two groups, homogeneous rank-ordered differences vector and outlier rank-ordered differences vector. The mean curvature diffusion filter is combined with a line process, which chooses selectively diffusion coefficient of the neighboring pixels belonging into homogeneous rank-ordered differences vector. Experimental results using an aerial image and a TerraSAR-X satellite image showed that the proposed method reduced more efficiently noises than some conventional adaptive filters using all neighboring pixels in updating the center pixel.