Nonstationary spatial texture estimation applied to adaptive speckle reduction of SAR data

This letter proposes a new model for the second-order statistics of spatial texture in synthetic aperture radar images. The autocovariance function is locally approximated by a two-dimensional anisotropic Gaussian kernel (AGK) to characterize texture by its local orientation and anisotropy. The estimation of texture parameters at a given scale is based on the gradient structure tensor operator and does not require the explicit computation of the autocovariance. Finally, a new filter called AGK minimum mean square error (MMSE) that takes into account this spatial information is introduced and compared with the refined MMSE filter. The proposed filter has better performance in terms of texture preservation and structure enhancement.