Performance of Speckle Filters for COSMO-SkyMed Images From the Brazilian Amazon

Abstract

Speckle filtering is an important step for target detection in SAR images since this effect makes it difficult or even impossible to extract information from these images. There are several filters available in the literature although evaluating their performances is not a trivial task since it requires comparing the filtered images with a speckle-free image, which is generally unknown. This evaluation is even more complex when the features in the images are heterogeneous, for example, from tropical forests. The objective of this study is to evaluate the performance of the Lee, deGrandi, GammaMAP, single Anisotropic Nonlinear Diffusion (ANLD), multitemporal ANLD, Fast Adaptive Nonlocal SAR (FANS), and Fast GPU-Based Enhanced Wiener filters to reduce the speckle present in the COSMO-SkyMed Stripmap X-band images from the Brazilian Amazon forest region. The evaluation was conducted qualitatively through the visual inspection of the ratio image and the edge detection in the ratio images and quantitatively through the αβ estimator and other statistical parameters of the filtered images. The GammaMAP filter showed the best performances, both qualitatively and quantitatively, and the FANS filter only qualitative.