• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.155-168
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• 1996

Speckle noise has been a primary concern to many applications of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery. In recent years, several satellites with radar imaging systems were launched and the use of SAR data are expected to be increased rapidly The objectives of this study are to provide introductory understanding on radar speckle filtering and to compare the effects of several filtering methods that are relatively unknown to user community. Two study sites were extracted from the RADARSAT SAR data obtained over the suburban areas near Seoul. The study sites include relatively homogeneous cover types, such as reservoir, parking lot, rice pad, and deciduous forest. Five filters (mean filter, median filter, sigma filter, local statistics filter, and autocorrelation filter) were applied to the SAR imagery and their effects were evaluated from the aspects of both image smoothing and edge preservation. In overall, the evaluation results indicate that the local statistics filter and autocorrelation filter, that are based on a speckle model, are more effective to suppress speckle within homogeneous cover type while maintaining the edge sharpness between cover types.

• The Journal of the Institute of Internet, Broadcasting and Communication
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• v.9 no.6
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• pp.155-161
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• 2009

Any classification process using SAR images presupposes the reduction of multiplicative speckle noise, since the variations caused by speckle make it extremely difficult to distinguish between neighboring classes within the feature space. This paper focus an argument of effective filter for preserving the weak boundaries by using the proposed method. To reduce speckle noise without blurring the edges of reconstructed image use wavelet-based sigma filter. As a result, the edge information of reconstructed image reduce blurring. Simulation results show that proposed method gives a better subjective quality than conventional methods for the speckle noise.

• Journal of Astronomy and Space Sciences
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.175-182
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• 1998

Any classification process using SAR images presupposes the reduction of multiplicative speckle noise, since the variations caused by speckle make it extremely difficult to distinguish between neighboring classes within the feature space. Therefore, several adaptive filter algorithms have been developed in order to distinguish between them. These algorithms aim at the preservation of edges and single scattering peaks, and smooths homogeneous areas as much as possible. This task is rendered more difficult by the multiplicative nature of the speckle noise the signal variation depends on the signal itself. In this paper, LEE(Lee 1908) and R-LEE(Lee 1981) filters using local statistics, local mean and variance, are applied to RADARSAT SAR images. Also, a new method of speckle filtering, EPOS(Edge Preserving Optimal Speckle)(Hagg & Sties 1994) filter based on the statistical properties of speckle noise is described and applied. And then, the results of filtering SAR images with LEE, R-LEE and EPOS filters are compared with mean and median filters.

• Proceedings of the KSRS Conference
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• 2002.10a
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• pp.476-483
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• 2002

In the past 20 years or so, numerous methods to reduce speckle in SAR images have been proposed. The primary goal of these methods is to reduce speckle without destroying resolution and smearing edge information. But the experiments indicate that there is always a kind of tradeoff between smoothing out speckle and preserving edge information. In this paper, an optimal SAR speckle filter is developed. It can effectively smooth out speckle while preserve edge information.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.26 no.6
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• pp.705-719
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• 2010

We investigated the speckle filtering effect in supervised classification of the C-band polarimetric Ground Based SAR image data. Wishart classification method was used for the supervised classification of the polarimetric GB-SAR image data and total of 6 kinds of speckle filters were applied before supervised classification, which are boxcar, Gaussian, Lopez, IDAN, the refined Lee, and the refined Lee sigma filters. For each filters, we changed the filtering kernel size from $3{\times}3$ to $9{\times}9$ to investigate the filtering size effect also. The refined Lee filter with the kernel size of bigger than $5{\times}5$ showed the best result for the Wishart supervised classification of polarimetric GB-SAR image data. The result also showed that the type of trees could be discriminated by Wishart supervised classification of polarimetric GB-SAR image data.

• Proceedings of the KSRS Conference
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• 2004.10a
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• pp.574-576
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• 2004

Since variance of noise is important parameter for a noise filter to reduce noise in image and the performance of noise filter is dependent on estimated variance. In this paper, we apply additive noise variance estimation method to estimate variance of speckle noise of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery. Generally, speckle noise is in multiplicative model, logarithmic transformation is then used to transform multiplicative model into additive model. Here, speckle noise is generally modeled as Gamma distribution function with different looks. The additive noise variance estimation is processed in log domain. The synthesis image and real image of SAR are implemented to test and confirm results and show that more accurate estimation can be achieved.

• The Korean Journal of Applied Statistics
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• v.23 no.3
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• pp.595-607
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• 2010

This paper addresses the problem of reducing the speckle noise in SAR images by wavelet transformation, using a non-local means(NLM) filter originated for Gaussian noise removal. Log-transformed SAR image makes multiplicative speckle noise additive. Thus, non-local means filtering and wavelet thresholding are used to reduce the additive noise, followed by an exponential transformation. NLM filter is an image denoising method that replaces each pixel by a weighted average of all the similarly pixels in the image. But the NLM filter takes an acceptable amount of time to perform the process for all possible pairs of pixels. This paper, also proposes an alternative strategy that uses the t-test more efficiently to eliminate pixel pairs that are dissimilar. Extensive simulations showed that the proposed filter outperforms many existing filters terms of quantitative measures such as PSNR and DSSIM as well as qualitative judgments of image quality and the computational time required to restore images.

• Proceedings of the KSRS Conference
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• 2006.03a
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• pp.299-302
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• 2006

SAR 영상의 Speckle noise는 해석을 방해하는 요인이 되고 분류할 때 분류정확도를 떨어뜨리는 역할을 하기 때문에 이를 감소시키기 위한 전처리 과정이 필요하다. 이 연구에서는 SAR 영상의 Speckle noise를 줄이기 위해서 영상의 특성을 분석하고 영상에 맞는 wavelet 변환을 이용한 필터링 기법과 Variogram에 기반한 필터링 기법을 제시하고 SAR 영상에 대한 적용 실험을 수행하였으며 그 결과를 분석하였다. 실험 결과 variogram 기반 필터링은 기존의 adaptive filter와 유사한 결과를 보였고 wavelet 기반 필터링은 기존의 필터링보다 좀 더 나은 결과를 보였다.

• Proceedings of the KSRS Conference
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• 2003.11a
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• pp.1087-1089
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• 2003

The aim of this study is to evaluate the Pi-SAR data for land cover discrimination using a standard method. For this purpose, the original polarization and Pauli components of the Pi-SAR X-band and L-band data are used and the results are compared. As a method for the land cover discrimination, the traditional method of statistical maximum likelihood decision rule is selected. To increase the accuracy of the classification result, different spatial thresholds based on local knowledge are determined and used for the actual classification process. Moreover, to reduce the speckle noise and increase the spatial homogeneity of different classes of objects, a speckle suppression filter is applied to the original Pi-SAR data before applying the classification decision rule. Overall, the research indicated that the original Pi-SAR polarization components can be successfully used for separation of different land cover types without taking taking special polarization transformations.

• Proceedings of the KSRS Conference
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• 2008.10a
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• pp.185-187
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• 2008

Speckle noise is primarily due to the phase fluctuations of the electromagnetic return signals. Since inherent spatial-correlation characteristics of speckle in SAR images are not exploited in existing multiplicative models for speckle noise. In this paper, we investigate the efficiency of the filters: Kuan, Gamma, Enhanced Lee, and Enhanced Frost filters in reduction of speckle noise in forestry area. Selection of the suitable filter can be played an important role in applications such as estimation of biomass in forestry areas. We employ ALOSPALSAR image use L-band frequency for this investigation. The filters test on different sites in PALSAR image of the northern forests part of Iran.