Analysis, evaluation, and comparison of polarimetric SAR speckle filtering techniques

Speckle noise filtering on polarimetric SAR (PolSAR) images remains a challenging task due to the difficulty to reduce a scatterer-dependent noise while preserving the polarimetric information and the spatial information. This challenge is particularly acute on single look complex images, where little information about the scattering process can be derived from a rank-1 covariance matrix. This paper proposes to analyze and to evaluate the performances of a set of PolSAR speckle filters. The filter performances are measured by a set of ten different indicators, including relative errors on incoherent target decomposition parameters, coherences, polarimetric signatures, point target, and edge preservation. The result is a performance profile for each individual filter. The methodology consists of simulating a set of artificial PolSAR images on which the various filters will be evaluated. The image morphology is stochastic and determined by a Markov random field and the number of scattering classes is allowed to vary so that we can explore a large range of image configurations. Evaluation on real PolSAR images is also considered. Results show that filters performances need to be assessed using a complete set of indicators, including distributed scatterer parameters, radiometric parameters, and spatial information preservation.