SAR Image Denoising Using an Improved Adaptive Bitateral Filter

Abstract

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images are inherently affected by multiplicative speckle noise. The presence of speckle damages radiometric resolution, at the same time, it hampers the human interpretation and scene analysis for SAR images. On the base of studying and analyzing the mathematical model of the bilateral filter, the paper proposed a modified adaptive bilateral filter (MABF). First, it separates non-independent two-dimensional Gaussian filter into two independent one-dimensional Gaussian filter, which improves the operation speed greatly. Then through the effective noise parameter estimation, it adaptively selects optimal parameters, which improves the filtering effect. The real SAR image data is used to test the presented method and the experimental results verify that MABF is feasible and effective.