The guided image filtering for speckle reduction in SAR images

The reduction of SAR image speckle noise is an important issue. However, the existing denoising methods may cause the resolution and details loss. This paper proposes a SAR image speckle reduction method based on the guided image filtering. This method combines the edge-preserving property of guided filtering and can maintain the detail information meanwhile suppressing the speckle. Experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively reduce speckle and keep the polarization information, point targets and texture structure. Meanwhile, it is able to handle large SAR images simply and effectively.