An Adaptive Region-Based Method for Speckle Reduction in SAR Images with Local Geometric Correlation

For adaptive region-based despeckling methods, the shape of the adaptive region is of large influence on the estimation of the true value. In this paper, given the effectiveness of patch-based index on measuring the relativity of samples, an adaptive region is formed at each pixel via the patch-based index where the local geometric correlation (such as the anisotropy and the compactness) among the pixels in the patch is explored as an Adaptive Kernel(AK) function. Then, using all pixels contained in the adaptive region, Maximum likelihood rule is adopted to estimate the true value of the concerned pixel. From the experimental results on real and synthetic SAR images, by using the AK function embedded patchy index to determine the adaptive region, not only the speckle is largely reduced, but also the resolution of the details is well preserved by our method.