A novel local variance-based filtering method for denoising remote sensing images

摘要

In this paper, a novel filtering method is designed for denoising remote sensing image. Firstly, the image domain of noisy image is partitioned into blocks for estimating the variance of Gaussian white noise. Secondly, based on the fact that the variance of the textural region is always larger than that of the homogeneous region, the noisy image is roughly divided into homogeneous and textural regions. Thirdly, a novel filter is designed and is used to reduce the noises. To this end, adaptive windows with appropriate shape and size are selected for each pixel. With the pixels in the window(s), the noise intensity of the central pixel is estimated and further qualified as a noise level. Based on noise levels, pixel values within the filter window are first updated and then filtered by using the proposed filter. Compared with other filtering methods, better performance is achieved in both noise smoothing and detail conserving.