Adaptive SAR Despeckling using a Proximity Measure to Boundary

In this paper, a SAR-despeckling approach of adaptive iteration based a Bayesian model using the lognormal distribution for image intensity and a Gibbs random field (GRF) for image texture is proposed for noise removal of the images that are corrupted by multiplicative speckle noise. When the image intensity is logarithmically transformed, the speckle noise is approximately Gaussian additive noise, and it tends to a normal probability much faster than the intensity distribution. The MRF is incorporated into digital image analysis by viewing pixel types as states of molecules in a lattice-like physical system. The iterative approach based on MRF is very effective for the inner areas of regions in the observed scene, but may result in yielding false reconstruction around the boundaries due to using wrong information of adjacent regions with different characteristics. The proposed method suggests an adaptive approach using variable parameters depending on the location of reconstructed area, that is, how near to the boundary. The proximity of boundary is estimated by the statistics based on edge value, standard deviation, entropy, and the 4th moment of intensity distribution.