POLARIMETRIC SAR ESTIMATION BASED ON NON-LOCAL MEANS

During the past few years, the non-local (NL) means [1] have proved their efficiency for image denoising. This approach assumes there exist enough redundant patterns in images to be used for noise reduction. We suggest that the same assumption can be done for polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) images. In its original version, the NL means deal with additive white Gaussian noise, but several extensions have been proposed for non-Gaussian noise. This paper applies the methodology proposed in [2] to PolSAR data. The proposed filter seems to deal well with the statistical properties of speckle noise and the multi-dimensional nature of such data. Results are given on synthetic and L-Band E-SAR data to validate the proposed method.