Suppression of speckle in synthetic aperture radar images using wavelet.

A filter for suppressing speckle in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images utilizing wavelet is proposed. The filter suppresses speckle by reducing the amplitude of the detail images in wavelet subspaces, while preserving edges by releasing the amplitude reduction around edges; information on edges, contained in the detail images, is utilized for edge detection. Simulations and application to SAR images have shown that the performance of the filter is satisfactory in both smoothing and edge preservation, and in generating visually-natural images as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]