SPECKLE REDUCTION IN SAR IMAGES USING A BAYESIAN MULTISCALE APPROACH

Abstract. Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images are corrupted by speckles, which influence the interpretation of the images. Therefore, to reduce speckles and obtain reliable information from images, researchers studied different methods. This study proposes a Bayesian multiscale method, to reduce speckles in SAR images. First, it was shown that Laplacian probability density function can capture the characteristics of noise-free curvelet coefficients, and then, a maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimator was designed for estimating them. Comparison of the results obtained with those obtained from conventional speckle filters, such as Lee, Kuan, Frost, and Gamma filters, and also curvelet non-Bayesian despeckling, shows better achievement of the proposed algorithm. For instance, the improvement in different parameters is as follows: ‘noise mean value’ (NMV) 0.24 times, ‘noise standard deviation’ (NSD) 0.34 times, ‘mean square difference’ (MSD) 2.6 times and ‘equivalent number of looks’ (ENL) 0.61 times.