POLARIMETRIC SAR ESTIMATION BASED ONNON-LOCAL MEANS

During the past few years, the non-local (NL) means [1] have proved their efficiency for image denoising. This approach assumes there exist enough redundant pat-terns in images to be used for noise reduction. We sug-gest that the same assumption can be done for polari-metric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) images. In its original version, the NLmeans deal with additive white Gaussian noise, but several extensions have been pro-posed for non-Gaussian noise. This paper applies the methodology proposed in [2] to PolSAR data. The pro-posed filter seems to deal well with the statistical prop-erties of speckle noise and the multi-dimensional nature of such data. Results are given on synthetic and L-Band E-SAR data to validate the proposed method. Index Terms — Non local means, maximum likeli-hood, polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) 1