SPECKLE NOISE SMOOTHING USING AN MODIFIED MEAN CURVATURE DIFFUSION FILTER

This paper presents a modified mean curvature diffusion filter to smooth speckle noise in images. Mean curvature diffusion filter has already shown good results in reducing noise in images while preserving fine details. In the mean curvature diffusion, the rate of smoothing is controlled by the local value of the diffusion coefficient chosen to be a function of the local image gradient magnitude. In this paper, the diffusion coefficient is modified to be controlled adaptively by local image surface slope and heterogeneity. The local surface slope contributes to preserving details (e.g.edges) in image and the local surface heterogeneity helps the smoothing filter consider the amount of noise in both edge and non-edge area. The proposed filter's performance is demonstrated by quantitative experiments using speckle noised aerial image and TerraSAR-X satellite image.