Abstract:
Speckle noise is one of the most critical disturbances that alter the quality of Synthetic
Aperture Radar (SAR) coherent images. Before using SAR images in automatic target
detection and recognition, the first step is to reduce the effect of speckle noise. Several
adaptive and non-adaptive filters are widely used for despeckling in SAR images. In this
paper, a novel mathematical morphological filter is proposed to reduce the speckle noise
in SAR images. The new filter performance is compared with a number of despeckling
filters with different parameters. For performance measurements, four parameters were
evaluated to test the filter ability to attenuate the speckle noise and keep target
information. From experimental results, the new proposed morphological filter gives
promising results for significantly suppressing speckle noise and preserving the
potential targets.