Adaptive Speckle Filtering for Time Series of Polarimetric SAR Images

Abstract

The temporal evolution of the polarimetric SAR data provides an extremely valuable information source for the various applications of this data. In this paper, the evolution of the agriculture crops in the time dimension is employed for multitemporal multidimensional speckle filtering. The proposed filtering method is based on a temporal statistical criterion dependent on all elements of the covariance matrix. Also, this method adaptively uses the pixels with the same scattering characteristics in the spatial and temporal space. The experimental results on time series of Radarsat-2 images show that the proposed filter preserves the polarimetric information and also has a better performance compared to the other used filters, based on different criteria such as the equivalent number of looks and edge-preservation parameter.