Feature Preserving SAR Despeckling and Its Parallel Implementation with Application to Railway Detection

Conference: EUSAR 2012 - 9th European Conference on Synthetic Aperture Radar
04/23/2012 - 04/26/2012 at Nuremberg, Germany

Proceedings: EUSAR 2012

Pages: 4Language: englishTyp: PDF

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Authors:
Okman, O. Erman; Nar, Fatih; Demirkesen, Can (Space and Defence Technologies Inc., Turkey)
etin, Müjdat (Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences, Sabanc, University, Turkey)

Abstract:
We consider the problem of despeckling synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images and propose an approach we call feature preserving despeckling (FPD). FPD is obtained through the adoption of a regularized SAR image reconstruction algorithm for the despeckling problem. FPD performs smoothing of homogeneous regions while preserving strong scatterers as well as region boundaries. We implement FPD in CUDA for fast parallel processing. We evaluate the performance of FPD through its impact on the performance of railway detection. To this end, we propose a semi-automated algorithm for railway detection in SAR images. We compare the performance of FPD to well-known despeckling methods and demonstrate the improvements it provides for railway detection.