An Edge-Aware Guided Filtering Technique for Multiplicative Noise Reduction in Satellite Images

In data acquisition, satellite images are easily affected by speckle noise, which degrades image quality. An edge-aware guided filtering technique for removing speckle noise has been proposed in this paper. In this technique, initially, the satellite images are applied on the joint bilateral filter. The non-additive noise was then transformed into additive noise using the log transform on the filtered image. The filtered image is split into low-frequency and high-frequency sub-bands using a 2D-DWT. The soft threshold eliminates additive noise from horizontal and the vertical sub-band images, in contrast to IGF, which only eliminates additive noise from low-frequency sub-band images. The simulation has been performed on real-time SAR image. The simulation outcomes show that the edge-aware guided filtering technique removes speckle noise more effectively than existing methods while conserving edges and minimizing computational complexity.