SAR image speckle suppression based on stack filters

Speckle suppression is an important step in syntetic aperture radar (SAR) image processing. This paper addresses the problem of reducing speckle in SAR images by employing stack filters. Median filters have been used to successfully reduce non-Gaussian noises and impulse noises. Stack filters are a very large class of nonlinear filters that possess the threshold decomposition and the stack property. In this paper, stacking median filters are introduced. An algorithm for SAR speckle suppression based on stacking median filters is proposed. Threshold selection is also discussed. Experiments are performed using SAR images at different threshold differences to show the proposed algorithm's effectiveness.