Nonlocal Means Filter for Polarimetric SAR Data Despeckling Based on Discriminative Similarity Measure

Abstract

This letter proposed a new nonlocal polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) filter based on discriminative similarity measure (DSM). The DSM, which is implemented in the form of maximum a posteriori (MAP), deals with the speckle and the underlying speckle-free signal of PolSAR data individually. Due to its MAP form, the DSM achieves good balance between the similarity of the speckle and the similarity of the underlying speckle-free signal. And then this balance can lead to excellent performance on both speckle smoothing and detail preservation. Results are shown to demonstrate its competence when compared with the state-of-the-art methods.