SAR Image Despeckling Using Refined Lee Filter

The presence of speckle noise in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images makes the interpretation of the contents difficult, thereby degrading the quality of the image. Therefore an efficient speckle noise removal technique needs to be sought. In this paper, we present a SAR image despeckling method known as Refined Lee Filter (RLF). The method is based on the well-known Lee filter. In this method the K-Nearest Neighbour (KNN) algorithm is employed to adjust the number of neighbour pixels used within the sliding window. Simulation results obtained from the performance evaluation metrics used showed that the proposed method improved the performance of the original Lee filter when they were both used to despeckle standard test images contaminated with speckle noise and SAR images.