A Hybrid Method of SAR Speckle Reduction Based on Geometric-Structural Block and Adaptive Neighborhood.

Given the improvement of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging technologies, the resolution of SAR image is largely improved and the variation of backscatter amplitude should be considered in SAR image processing. In this paper, considering the spatial geometric properties of SAR image in gray pixel space and the sample selection in the estimation of true signal, local directional property of each pixel is explored with the help of SAR sketching method, and two specially designed filters are integrated for adaptive speckle reduction of SAR images. Specifically, based on the sketch map of a SAR image, the orientation of the sketch point lying at each sketch segment is assigned to the corresponding pixel, and thus all pixels of the SAR image are classified as the directional pixels and the nondirectional pixels. For the directional pixels, given the significant directionality of its neighborhood, a geometricstructural block (GB) is built to center on it and GB-wised nonlocal means filter is designed to estimate the true values of all pixels contained in the GB. Moreover, using the local orientation, the whole image is adopted as the searching range to search the similar GBs. For the nondirectional pixels, based on the locally estimated equivalent number of looks, a novel pixel-based metric is proposed to determine the local adaptive neighborhood (AN) with which an AN-based filter is developed to estimate its true value. Besides, since some nondirectional pixels are contained in GBs, a Bayesian-based fusion strategy is designed for the fusion of their estimated values. In the experiments, three synthetic speckled images and five real SAR images [obtained with different resolutions (e.g., 3, 1, and 0.1 m) and different bands (e.g., X-band, C-band, and Ka-band)] are used for evaluation and analysis. Owing to the usage of local spatial geometric property and the combination of two different filters, the proposed method shows a reasonable performance among the comparison methods, in terms of the speckle reduction and the details' preservation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]