An automated method for finding the optimal parameters of adaptive filters for speckle denoising of SAR images

Many different filters can be used to reduce multiplicative speckle noise on radar images. Most of these filters have some parameters whose values influence the result of filtering. Finding optimal values of such parameters may be a non-trivial task. In this paper, a formal automated method for finding optimal parameters of speckle noise reduction filters is proposed. Using a specially designed test image, optimal parameters for the most commonly used filters were found using several image quality assessment metrics, including the Structural Similarity Index (SSIM) and Gradient Magnitude Similarity Deviation (GMSD). The use of filters with optimal parameters allows processing (detection, segmentation, etc.) of radar images with minimal influence of speckle noise.