An improved PolSAR image speckle reduction algorithm based on LMMSE and RICA

Abstract

Although the linear minimum mean square error (LMMSE) filter removes speckle in polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) images, it has the disadvantage of losing edge detail. In this paper, we propose a new filter based on robust independent component analysis (RICA) and LMMSE. This approach describes edge features in a span image by selecting the adaptive direction window and calculating the edge weight value of the spatial domain, and improves the objective function by using a step polynomial to extract the estimate of the source image with minimum noise. This technique preserves not only the edge information in the images, but also the polarimetric information. Experiments were conducted on the NASA/JPL AIRSAR L-band of the San Francisco area, and evaluated by means of the speckle reduction index and the edge preservation index. The experimental results show that the proposed method effectively reduces speckle, retains edges, and preserves the polarimetric scattering mechanisms.