Study on speckle reduction in multi-look polarimetric SAR image

This paper studies the speckle reduction in multi-look polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image. A multi-look polarimetric whitening filtering (MPWF) method is presented and extended to form a fully polarimetric filter with multi-channel output. The paper also quantifies the speckle reduction amount achievable by the MPWF, and compares the MPWF with the span, weighting and power equalization methods. Experimental results with the NASA/JPL L-band 4-look polarimetric SAR data verify the effectiveness and superiority of the MPWF, and show that the MPWF is of great advantage for enhancing SAR image classification.