Noise reduction in synthetic aperture radar images using fuzzy logic and genetic algorithm

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is a self-illuminating imaging technique; it produces high resolution images in all weather conditions, day and night. SAR images are widely accepted and used by many application scientists. However, the SAR images are corrupted with speckle noise. Speckle noises are caused by random interference of electromagnetic signals scattered by the object surface within one resolution element. The amount of noise and distribution of noise corrupting the image is unpredictable. Conventional noise filters are quantitative in nature; they are not well suited for uncertainty problems. Fuzzy logic is capable of handling uncertainty. In this work, noisy pixels in the images are identified by using fuzzy rules and filtered using fuzzy weighted mean, keeping the healthy pixels unchanged. The optimum value of parameters used in defining fuzzy membership function is determined by using genetic algorithm (GA). Reducing noise and simultaneously preserving image details are the two most desirable characteristics of noise filters. Peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and edge preserving factor (EPF) are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed fuzzy filter. SAR images affected by varying amounts of speckle noise are used to evaluate the performance. It was observed that the proposed filter suppresses noise and preserves image edges.