Speckle noise reduction in SAR images using a new morphological filter

Abstract

Abstract:Speckle noise is one of the most critical disturbances that alter the quality of SyntheticAperture Radar (SAR) coherent images. Before using SAR images in automatic targetdetection and recognition, the first step is to reduce the effect of speckle noise. Severaladaptive and non-adaptive filters are widely used for despeckling in SAR images. In thispaper, a novel mathematical morphological filter is proposed to reduce the speckle noisein SAR images. The new filter performance is compared with a number of despecklingfilters with different parameters. For performance measurements, four parameters wereevaluated to test the filter ability to attenuate the speckle noise and keep targetinformation. From experimental results, the new proposed morphological filter givespromising results for significantly suppressing speckle noise and preserving thepotential targets.