Fast Local SAR Image Despeckling by Edge-Avoiding Wavelets

Abstract

In this paper, a local despeckling algorithm based on a trous version of edge-avoiding wavelets for synthetic aperture radar images is proposed. Edge-avoiding wavelets provide the decomposition of the input image into several detail layers and a residual image which corresponds to the despeckled result by means of weighted a trous wavelet transform. The weight function is similar to the range kernel of the well-known bilateral filter and is determined by enhancing evaluation indexes. Visual and quantitative comparisons validate the performance of the proposed method in terms of both speckle reduction and edge preservation ability.