Multi-scale MAP Denoising of SAR and SAS Images Denoising Terrestrial and Under-water Images using Wavelets

The SAR and SAS images are perturbed by a multiplicative noise called speckle, due to the coherent nature of the scattering phenomenon. The use of speckle reduction filters is necessary to optimize the image exploitation procedures. This paper presents a new denoising method in the wavelet domain, which tends to reduce the speckle, preserving the structural features (like the discontinuities) and textural information of the scene. Due to the massive proliferation of SONAR images the proposed technique is very appealing in ocean applications. In fact it is a pre-treatment required in any SONAR images analysis system. Simulation examples prove the performance of the proposed denoising method.