Evaluation for coherent speckle suppression filters of SAR images

To evaluate the preformance of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) coherent speckle filtering algorithms, an evaluation system is proposed, including nine criteria: equivalent number of looks (or smoothing index), radiometric resolution, loss of the signal to clutter ratio, signal radiometric loss, bias, spatial resolution loss, edge keeping index, bias of the peak sidelobe rate and bias of integration sidelobe rate. This evaluation procedure can measure both the speckle suppression preformance and the loss of original information of the image. Test results of the real and simulated SAR images and typical speckle filtering algorithms show that these criteria are effective and in accordance with the visual assessment.