Multi-Temporal Speckle Reduction of Polarimetric SAR Images: a Ratio-Based Approach

Abstract

The availability of multi-temporal stacks of SAR images opens the way to new speckle reduction methods. Beyond mere spatial filtering, the time series can be used to improve the signal-to-noise ratio of structures that persist for several dates. Among multi-temporal filtering strategies to reduce speckle fluctuations, a recent approach has proved to be very effective: ratio-based filtering (RABASAR). This method, developed to reduce the speckle in multi-temporal intensity images, first computes a mean image with a high signal-to-noise ratio (a so-called super-image), and then processes the ratio between the multi-temporal stack and the super-image. In this paper, we propose an extension of this approach to polarimetric SAR images. We illustrate its potential on a stack of fully-polarimetric images from RADARSAT-2 satellite.