Speckle noise reduction in SAR images using an adaptive wavelet Shrinkage method

Although Synthetic Aperture Radar(SAR) is a very powerful and attractive tool, automatic interpretation of SAR images is extremely difficult because of several reason. Spatially, speckle noise reduction in SAR images is important step to interpret the SAR image at the preprocessing step. The speckle noise in SAR images is modeled to be multiplicative, and therefore, a signal-dependent noise. So, it has deflated many image-denoising algorithms that are based on additive noise model. In this paper, we propose an adaptive wavelet shrinkage method for speckle noise reduction in SAR images by analyzing the high frequency level in detail. We first decompose minutely the high frequency level to analyze the noise level. And then, we determine the weighting threshold value per the level, and layer. Finally, using those weighting threshold, we produce the efficient wavelet shrinkage method. So, this method not only reduces the speckle noise, but also preserves image detail and sharpness.