DESPECKLING OF SYNTHETIC APERTURE RADAR SATELLITE IMAGERY USING VARIOUS FILTERING TECHNIQUES

Abstract

Active microwave imaging systems such as Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is the Earth observation satellite which works day/night, irrespective of the unconditional weather condition. Satellite Synthetic SAR images are predominantly affected by multiplicative speckle noise. Noise is an unwanted signal, which suppresses the quality of the image and makes the processing of the image difficult and should be removed or reduced with the help of filtering techniques. Different filtering techniques like Min, Max, Mean, Median, Statistical and Adaptive filters are applied on the speckle affected SAR images captured by RADARSAT-1 and Sentinel-1A satellites. The results are compared qualitatively and from the obtained results, it is observed that the Median filter is able to suppress speckle noise by preserving the required details and is giving the promising results compared to the other filters.