Combining Fusion-Based Thresholding and Non-Linear Diffusion for Improved Speckle Noise Mitigation in SAR Images

The primary concern of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images is speckle noise, an inherent property. The creation of speckle noise is in a granular form and its nature is multiplicative. To reduce such noise from the radar images, the researchers’ primary motive is to suppress granular pattern while preserving the quality of the obtained images, thereby facilitating easier feature extraction and classification. Existing speckle-noise reduction methods often fail to preserve fine details such as edges and textures. This study proposes a fusion-based method that integrates non-linear transform-based thresholding with advanced noise reduction techniques. The proposed method is implemented on two simulated SAR images at noise variance levels of σ = from 5 to 40. The fundamental and most significant step is to analyze the effect of granular patterns in radar images before despeckling. Different performance metrics, classified into with-reference and without-reference indexes, are considered to investigate the effectiveness of the proposed despeckle method. The Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) for SAR-1 at σ = 20 was observed at 16.22 dB, outperforming the next best result of 12.89 dB from the Log Compression filter. The Universal Image Quality Index (UIQI) reached 0.6987, indicating high visual quality retention across various noise levels. The proposed despeckling method demonstrated superior performance in comparison to different filters, achieving a Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) improvement of up to 29.37 dB on SAR-2 at a noise variance of σ = 5, significantly higher than the best filter method’s 26.70 dB. Additionally, the method achieved a Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) of 0.6538, indicating superior image quality preservation.