Despeckling of SAR Images Using BEMD-Based Adaptive Frost Filter

In image processing, removal of speckle noise from a satellite image is a challenging task for the researchers. There are various approaches for speckle noise reduction. Generally, the speckle noises are scattered, in satellite images, medical images and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. This paper introduces a bidimensional empirical mode decomposition (BEMD)-based adaptive filtering method for despeckling of SAR image. The noisy SAR image is decomposed into different bidimensional intrinsic mode function (BIMF) levels using BEMD and then filtering is performed on the first BIMF level, as it contains the high-frequency noise component. This adaptation process effectively filters out the noisy image component without destroying the original image component. A BEMD-based adaptive Frost filter is introduced in this paper for despeckling of SAR images. The despeckling performances of our proposed filtering method are further analyzed by visual evaluation and also using performance parameters comparatively. Our reconstructed images show better performance quantitatively and qualitatively compared to other filters.