Enhanced Directional Smoothing Algorithm for Edge-Preserving Smoothing of Synthetic-Aperture Radar Images

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images are subject to prominent speckle noise, which is generally considered a purely multiplicative noise process. In theory, this multiplicative noise is that the ratio of the standard deviation to the signal value, the “coefficient of variation,” is theoretically constant at every point in a SAR image. Most of the filters for speckle reduction are based on this property. Such property is irrelevant for the new filter structure, which is based on directional smoothing (DS) theory, the enhanced directional smoothing (EDS) that removes speckle noise from SAR images without blurring edges. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this new filtering method by comparing it to established speckle noise removal techniques on SAR images.