Speckle Suppression Using the Empirical Mode Decomposition
利用经验模态分解方法抑制SAR斑点噪声

An effective algorithm for suppressing speckle in synthetic aperture radar(SAR)images utilizing the empirical mode decomposition(EMD)method is presented in this paper.The EMD was proposed by Norden E Huang et al .,with which any complicated data set can be decomposed into a finite and often small number of intrinsic mode functions.Contrary to almost all previous methods,this new method is intuitive,direct,a posterior and adaptive,with the basis of the decomposition based on,and derived from,the data.So EMD is quite suitable for analyzing nonlinear and non_stationary data.A line of digital SAR images can be decomposed into a series of modes whose characteristic space scale defined by the space lapse between the extrema is different.The speckle noise is defined by the mode whose space scale is not more than 4.The SAR speckle suppression is implemented by smearing short space scale component in the spatial domain via the EMD.As the EMD is one_dimensional method,we use EMD in the following way.First we process each horizontal row of pixels,then process each column pixel of image. EMD is based on and derived from the data,thus it is adaptive and can preserve the edge information.Application to SAR images has shown that the performance of the algorithm is satisfactory in both smoothing and edge preservation.