Speckle suppression in SAR images employing modified anisotropic diffusion filtering in wavelet domain for environment monitoring

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is a tool of coherent imagery utilized for meteorological and astronomical purposes. But, these images are contaminated with speckle noise which degrades the image quality and automatic information extraction becomes difficult. This paper presents an improved filtering technique which combines the Wavelets and proposed Anisotropic Diffusion (AD) filter for despeckling SAR images. The speckled image is initially decomposed into sub-bands using 2D-Discrete Wavelet Transform (2D-DWT) followed by application of modified AD filter. The diffusion coefficient presented in this modified AD filter consists of a combination of gradient and Laplacian operators. The spatial variation of this diffusion coefficient occurs in such a way that it prefers forward diffusion to backward diffusion resulting in effective reconstruction of structural content and detection of weak edges. The filtered sub-bands are then reconstructed after soft thresholding. Based on the simulation results as well as the values of image quality metrics; filtered SAR images obtained by the proposed speckle suppression methodology can be claimed better in comparison to other recent works. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.