Speckle suppression using recursive wavelet transforms

An effective algorithm for digital image noise smoothing using wavelet transform techniques is presented in this paper. This algorithm is more powerful when compared to other existing filtering algorithms in terms of speckle suppression for synthetic aperture radar images where the presence of speckle makes the ratio of standard deviation to mean (STM) very high. Examples show that the original STM of about 0.30 (equivalent to three-look images) can be reduced to 0.05-0.03 (equivalent to more than 100-look images), with a possible small sacrifice of losing some details and narrow edges. The quantitative analysis is carried out and compared with the results of some existing filtering algorithms including median, K nearest neighbour averaging, Lee's multiplicative and Crimmins' geometric filters, showing that imagery filtered by the wavelet transform is the smoothest.