Speckle suppression and analysis for synthetic aperture radar images

Speckle appearing in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images is generated by coherent interference of radar echoes from target scatters. Basically, speckle noise has the nature of a multiplicative noise. In this paper procedures for defining and verifying a statistical noise model are developed, and two multiplicative noise-smoothing algorithms are pre-sented. These two algorithms are computationally efficient and have the potential of achieving real-time or near-real-time processing. Several SEASAT SAR and SIR-B (Shuttle Imaging Radar) images are used for illustration.