A fuzzy filter for SAR image de-noising

In this paper, a new approach to speckle filtering of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data is presented. The idea of fuzzy window is firstly presented, where the similarity of scattering mechanism between the central filtered pixel and neighborhood pixel is depicted by the fuzzy membership function. Based on the fuzzy window, a fuzzy filter is proposed; where different pixels in the neighborhood window make different contribution to the local statistics calculation, according to their membership function value. By paying more attention to the similar scattering mechanism pixels, better performance is achieved, especially for edge/structure preserving. The effectiveness of the fuzzy filter is demonstrated using the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Jet Propulsion Laboratory airborne SAR data.