Polarimetric SAR Image Smoothing with Stochastic Distances
This work addresses noise reduction for remote sensing applications, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing smoothing techniques.
The paper tackled the problem of speckle noise in polarimetric SAR images by proposing a smoothing technique using stochastic distances, resulting in images with good noise reduction and preservation of fine details across visualization spaces.
Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (PolSAR) images are establishing as an important source of information in remote sensing applications. The most complete format this type of imaging produces consists of complex-valued Hermitian matrices in every image coordinate and, as such, their visualization is challenging. They also suffer from speckle noise which reduces the signal-to-noise ratio. Smoothing techniques have been proposed in the literature aiming at preserving different features and, analogously, projections from the cone of Hermitian positive matrices to different color representation spaces are used for enhancing certain characteristics. In this work we propose the use of stochastic distances between models that describe this type of data in a Nagao-Matsuyama-type of smoothing technique. The resulting images are shown to present good visualization properties (noise reduction with preservation of fine details) in all the considered visualization spaces.