Despeckling SAR Image Quality Evaluation by Homogeneity and Heterogeneity Scene Patches

Abstract

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging is hindered by coherent imaging mechanisms, leading to degradation in image quality due to speckle. Current methods can effectively suppress speckles but may lead to varying degrees of edge information loss. The accurate and comprehensive evaluation of speckle suppression is vital for enhancing SAR image interpretation. Therefore, this study proposes a novel method for evaluating despeckling image quality based on adaptively extracting homogeneity and heterogeneity scene patches (IQE_HHSP). The proposed IQE_HHSP effectively extracts homogeneous and heterogeneous patches, and performs speckle suppression and edge-preservation evaluation based on the extracted patch feature, achieving comprehensive evaluation of filtered image. The efficacy of IQE_HHSP is demonstrated through the evaluation on four SAR images using six comparative evaluation indicators. The experimental results indicate that IQE_HHSP provides the accurate quality assessment of SAR filtering models, yielding results consistent with visual observations.

Keywords

• Edge preservation
• heterogeneity
• homogeneity
• patches
• speckle
• speckle suppression