Introducing a new image quality index for evaluating despeck-ling filtering operation in SAR images

Abstract

© VDE VERLAG GMBH · Berlin · Offenbach, Germany.SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) images are corrupted with a multiplicative granular-like noise pattern known as speckle. The goal for a despeckling filter consists of suppressing the speckle while preserving all the scene features such as texture, point-type targets, and, especially, edges. There exist several speckle filtering and a relevant number of image quality indexes to evaluate the performances of a filtering operation on a SAR image. To decide the superiority of a despeckling filter other one, if so, is not a trivial issue. In this work, we present a new estimator based on the gradient-ratio operator which allows to help in evaluating a filter realization on SAR images.

SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) images are corrupted with a multiplicative granular-like noise pattern known as speckle. The goal for a despeckling filter consists of suppressing the speckle while preserving all the scene features such as texture, point-type targets, and, especially, edges. There exist several speckle filtering and a relevant number of image quality indexes to evaluate the performances of a filtering operation on a SAR image. To decide the superiority of a despeckling filter other one, if so, is not a trivial issue. In this work, we present a new estimator based on the gradient-ratio operator which allows to help in evaluating a filter realization on SAR images.