Application of SUSAN to reduce the speckle noise of remote sensing image

Abstract

Speckle noise can be introduced to a remote sensing image in many ways, starting with the lens of the imaging hardware and ending at the digitization of the captured image. The reduction of noise without degradation of the remote sensing image has attracted much attention in the past. However, the traditional noise reduction methods can usually cause the degradation of the underlying image and cannot preserve the feature of structure in remote sensing image, especially two dimensional image brightness structures. With regard to the traditional speckle noise reduction methods, their results aren't very well even though the traditional methods are improved. In this paper, a method for speckle noise reduction of remote sensing image based on SUSAN is designed. This paper tests this method in a SPOT image of 128*128 suffering from speckle noise using 3 by 3 and 5 by 5 mask and gives results of quantitative and qualitative comparisons of the SUSAN noise filter with other traditional noise reduction methods. The results of the test prove that the SUSAN filter can effectively remove speckle noise and preserve edge and texture information. The processing speed of this algorithm is faster than that of the traditional noise reduction methods.