Wavelet Based Speckle Reduction with Application to SAR based ATD/R

          H. Guo, J. E. Odegard, M. Lang, R. A. Gopinath,
                  I. W. Selesnick C. S. Burrus 
     Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering - MS366
        	Rice University, Houston, TX-77251


   			     ABSTRACT

This paper introduces a novel speckle reduction method based on
thresholding the wavelet coefficients of the logarithmically
transformed image. The method is computational efficient and can
significantly reduce the speckle while preserving the resolution of
the original image. Both soft and hard thresholding schemes are 
studied and the results are compared. When fully polarimetric SAR
images are available, we proposal several approcahes to combine the
data from different polorizations to achieve even better
performance. Wavelet processed imagery is shown to provide better
detection performance for synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) based
automatic target detection/recognition (ATD/R) problem.