A SAR Image Despeckling Method Based on Two-Dimensional S Transform Shrinkage

Speckle is a granular disturbance that affects synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. Over the last three decades, many methods have been proposed for speckle reduction, where a tradeoff between despeckling and detail preservation is required. As an attempt to balance the performance on both sides, in this paper, we propose a 2-D S transform shrinkage algorithm using adaptive soft threshold for SAR image despeckling. It follows the idea of the wavelet shrinkage algorithm, but extends its major steps to take into account the peculiarities of S transform, i.e., adding adaptivity in the estimation of speckle standard deviation and threshold function, in an optimized computation procedure. Homogeneous and heterogeneous SAR images are used for quantitative evaluations, and both vintage and prevailing algorithms are used for comparison, which demonstrates the validity of the proposed method. Additionally, some instructive pieces of advice are given on the selection of suitable parameters of the proposed method under different circumstances.