A novel Lee filtering algorithm based on adaptive size sliding window

Abstract

Lots of speckle noise exists in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images inherently. The speckle noise causes various difficulties in the subsequent SAR image processing. In this paper, a novel Lee filtering algorithm based on an adaptive size sliding window is proposed. The adaptive sliding window makes the local statistics acquired from the image more accurate, which improves the performance of proposed algorithm on the edge protection and noise filtering. In this paper, a series of comparative experiments for speckle suppression is conducted on both optical simulation images and SAR images. The experimental results show that the performance of the proposed improved Lee filter to suppress speckle noise is better than the traditional Lee filtering algorithm while more details are preserved.