Edge detection and speckle adaptive filtering for SAR images based on a second-order textural measure

An edge detector based on a second-order texture measure is presented. It is demonstrated that the operator is well adapted for SAR image analysis: it possesses good sensitivity to edges and its response does not depend on the image brightness. In the second part of the paper, an adaptive speckle filter based on the presented edge detector is introduced. The potential of the filter is illustrated using an airborne SAR image. It is shown that the filter preserves edges better than filters based on the coefficient of variation and still provides good sensitivity to textural patterns other than speckle. Considering the recognized importance of texture in the interpretation of radar imagery, these filters may be useful for pre-interpretation image enhancement.