Improved SMB speckle filtering of polarimetric SAR data with synergistic use of orientation angle compensation and spatial majority rule

Abstract

The scattering-model-based (SMB) speckle filtering for polarimetric SAR (PolSAR) data is reasonably effective in preserving dominant scattering mechanisms. However, the efficiency strongly depends on the accuracies of both the decomposition and classification of the scattering properties. In addition, a relatively weak speckle reduction particularly in distributed media was reported in the related literatures. In this work, an improved SMB filtering strategy is proposed considering the aforementioned deficiencies. First, the orientation angle compensation is incorporated into the SMB filtering process to remedy the overestimation of the volume scattering contribution in the Freeman-Durden decomposition. In addition, an algorithm to select the homogenous pixels is developed based on the spatial majority rule for adaptive speckle reduction. We demonstrate the superiority of the proposed methods in terms of scattering property preservation and speckle noise reduction using L-band PolSAR data sets of San Francisco that were acquired by the NASA/JPL airborne SAR (AIRSAR) system.