Speckle filtering of Synthetic Aperture Radar images using filters with object-size-adapted windows

Speckle degrades the radiometric quality of a Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image. Previous methods for speckle reduction have used a fixed-size window for filtering the entire image. This, however, may not be effective for the entire image, as land covers of different sizes require different filtering windows. In this paper, a novel method is proposed by which each pixel in the image is filtered with a window appropriate for the size of object within it. The real in-phase and the imaginary quadrature components of the SAR images determine the best window size and the pixels in the intensity image are filtered using their own optimal windows. The proposed method is presented for both single- and multi-polarized SAR images, and the results of several common filters that were modified are presented. This approach is applied to two RADARSAT-2 images: one over San Francisco, California, USA and the other over St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, producing results that were similar to, or outperformed, comparable filters while retaining details and suppressing speckle effectively. While the method was successful for single-look intensity data, it offers great potential for multi-look and amplitude data as well.