IMPACT OF DFT BASED SPECKLE REDUCTION FILTER ON CLASSIFICATION
ACCURACY OF SYNTHETIC APERTURE RADAR IMAGES
2020 IEEE India Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (InGARSS) | 978-1-7281-3114-6/20/$31.00 ©2020 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/InGARSS48198.2020.9358943
Vijal Jain1 , Sanjay Shitole1 , Varsha Turkar2 , Anup Das3
1 Usha Mittal Institute of Technology, SNDT Women’s University, Mumbai, India
2 Don Bosco College of Engineering, Margao, Goa, India
3 Space Application Centre, ISRO, Ahmedabad, India
ABSTRACT
Speckle in SAR images makes it difficult to interpret the
image thus reducing the effectiveness of image processing.
In remote sensing, image scene classification is an elemen-
tary problem which aims to label an image automatically
with a specific semantic category. The classification per-
formance of SAR data with speckle is inadequate for many
applications. Thus, speckle removal becomes an important
pre-processing step for SAR data classification. This study
investigates the impact and importance of speckle filtering
for classification using ALOS-PALSAR-2 data on San Fran-
cisco area. Wishart classifier is chosen for classification
of filtered and unfiltered SAR data. The influence of DFT
based speckle reduction framework is investigated in terms
of classification accuracy.
Index Terms: SAR, speckle noise, DFT, classification
1. INTRODUCTION
Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images can provide a great
deal of information of the land cover in all weather con-
ditions and at all time [1]. SAR image classification is a
trending topic and has several applications in the fields of
agriculture, geology and oceanology. SAR images are inex-
orably contaminated by multiplicative speckle noise during
acquisition and transmission [2]. Speckle introduces ambi-
guity during image interpretation thereby reducing the accu-
racy of image segmentation and classification. To eliminate
speckle noise, many filtering approaches are proposed by
researchers. In general, there are three categories in which
despeckling methods are divided. (i) multi-look processing
method; (ii) spatial filtering technique; and (iii) transform
domain filtering technique [3, 4].
The multi-look method takes into consideration multi-
ple sub-views which are generated by dividing the doppler
bandwidth of the synthetic aperture before imaging to form
a multi-look image [5][6]. The multi-look method is easy
to implement. However, this technique reduces the resolu-
tion of the image. The second method is used directly on
Corresponding Author:jainorvijal3@gmail.com
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the pixels of the image. Many spatial filters like Mean, Me-
dian, Lee, Frost and other algorithms were used to remove
speckle noise [7][8].
The mean filter [9] results in a good noise smoothing ca-
pacity although it causes resolution loss around sharp edges.
The median filter is effective in removing outlying spot noise
but few of the observations of this filter are that the edges are
blurred, thin linear features are erased and object shapes are
distorted. To overcome the obstacle of non−selective aver-
aging of the mean filter, a class of adaptive filters was devel-
oped, known as Local Statistics Filter or Lee Filter [9]. The
advantage of Lee filter is noise in homogeneous regions is
smoothened and linear features are preserved. On the con-
trary it fails to smoothen the noise at the edges.
The Lopes filter [9] modifies the Lee filter by incorpo-
rating an upper and a lower limit on region’s homogeneity
thus homogeneous noise is smoothened and edges and lin-
ear features are preserved but the challenge is, if limits are
not set correctly, undesirable bright spots appear. In Ar-
senault filter the main drawback is that strong signals are
severely compressed relative to the weak signals [10][11].
Spatial filtering is inefficient in differentiating the signal
from its noise. To achieve a noise free image with less loss
of edge information, it is necessary to tune the transform
coefficients in the frequency domain.
With reference to [12], the DFT based speckle reduction
framework makes use of Boxcar filter for reducing speckle
noise but retains the edges, texture and point targets by trans-
forming the image in frequency domain using Discrete Fourier
Transform (DFT). Boxcar filter is widely used in the SAR
application domain owing to its simplicity. In spite of its
simplicity, the boxcar filter is optimal for a common task of
reducing random noise with limited requirements of com-
putational time.
2. STUDY AREA AND DATA SET
The SAR dataset used for this study are obtained from Ad-
vanced Land Observation Satellite Phase Array type L-band
Synthetic Aperture Radar (ALOS-PALSAR-2). It was launched
by JAXA (Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency) [13]
54 InGARSS 2020
with the PALSAR-2 sensor. The image covers a part of San
Francisco, California, in the USA.
The size of image is 5211 × 5564 pixels, incident angles
span from 8◦ to 70◦ [14]. In this work water, settlement and
forest classes are studied.
3. METHODOLOGY
Speckle noise is generally impaired in SAR images and thus
the process of speckle removal is important for classifica-
tion, segmentation and other analysis. The proposed frame-
work addresses the importance of despeckling SAR images
before classification.
Fig. 1: Proposed Framework
Fig. 1 illustrates the proposed framework which is di-
vided into three parts a) DFT based speckle reduction frame-
work; b) Extraction of data samples for training and testing
and c) Image classification. The detailed explanation is as
follows:
1. The PolSAR data is converted into its equivalent T3
matrix. The diagonal terms of T3 matrix is charac-
terized by multiplicative noise model [15, 16]
2. The DFT framework is applied on three channels of
the T3 matrix (T11 , T22 and T33 )
3. Steps 4 to 9 are applied on the first channel T11
4. The Boxcar filter of size 7 × 7 is applied on T11 ma-
trix. This step results in maximum noise suppression.
However, fine details are blurred due to non selective
averaging of boxcar filter.
5. In order to retain the edges and point targets, DFT is
applied on the original T11 matrix to differentiate the
high frequency components from the low frequency
components.
55
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6. High pass filter is applied on the transformed image
matrix to extract the high frequency components.
7. Inverse Discrete Fourier Transform is applied to con-
vert the image matrix back to spatial domain.
8. Boxcar filter of mask 3 × 3 is applied to smoothen
the noise around the high frequency components.
9. The summation of step 3 and step 8 will result in a
speckle reduced SAR image.
10. Similarly, the procedure is applied on T22 and T33
matrices respectively.
The filtered T matrix [16, 17] is shown in equation 1.
 
T11 T12 T13
 
†
 
T = kk =  T12
 ∗ T22 T23   (1)
 
∗
T13 ∗
T23 T33
The same training and testing samples are taken for fil-
tered and unfiltered SAR data classification. The classi-
fication is applied on the filtered and non-filtered T ma-
trix. To see the impact of this DFT based speckle reduc-
tion framework on classification accuracy, the Wishart su-
pervised classification algorithm is used in this study.
4. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
The effect of speckle filtering on classification accuracy was
studied. Lee filter and DFT based speckle reduction frame-
work were applied on the dataset followed by Wishart clas-
sification. Fig. 2 illustrates the classification results. Confu-
sion matrix [18] is computed for unfiltered, Lee filtered and
DFT based speckle reduction framework to compare the re-
sults of classification.
Table 1, 2 and 3 exhibits the confusion matrix of unfil-
tered, Lee filtered and DFT based speckle reduction frame-
work respectively, wherein the actual classes and predicted
classes are represented as rows and columns respectively.
The values are normalized to 100%. The diagonal ele-
ments represent the elements which are correctly classified
whereas the off-diagonal elements represent misclassified
elements. Table 4 depicts that the classification accuracy of
DFT based speckle reduction framework is 3.691% higher
compared to Lee filter. The unfiltered image shows 3.77
% lower classification accuracy as compared to DFT based
speckle reduction framework which emphasises the need to
despeckle SAR image before classification. Based on the
evaluation parameters referenced in [8], Table 5 illustrates
a comparison of lee filter with DFT based speckle reduction
framework.
 (a) (b)

(c) (d)
Fig. 2: (a) Unfiltered Image I. PauliRGB Image II. Classified Image (b) Lee Filtered Image III. PauliRGB Image IV. Classified
Image (c) DFT Framework Filtered Image V. PauliRGB Image VI. Classified Image (d) Legend

Table 4: Comparison of Classification Accuracy for Unfil-

tered, Lee Filter and DFT Framework
Table 1: Confusion Matrix of Unfiltered SAR Data Unfiltered Lee filter DFT framework
Predicted Values Water 100 100 100
Settlement 81.818 82.828 90.909
Water Settlement Forest Forest 82.653 81.818 84.848
Water 99.97 0.00 0.03 Overall accuracy 88.176 88.255 91.946
Actual
Settlement 0.01 81.10 18.89
Values
Forest 0.95 17.24 81.81
Table 5: Evaluation of Speckle Filters

Table 2: Confusion Matrix of Lee Filtered SAR Data ENL ESIV ESIH Ratio Image
Mean SD
Predicted Values Lee Filter 26.21 0.74 0.72 0.98 0.11
DFT Framework 49.09 0.58 0.45 0.98 0.26
Water Settlement Forest
Water 100.00 0.00 0.00
Actual
Settlement 0.00 82.72 17.28
Values 5. CONCLUSION
Forest 0.73 18.02 81.25

Table 3: Confusion Matrix of DFT Framework In this paper DFT based speckle reduced framework is an-
alyzed in terms of classification accuracy compared to Lee
Predicted Values filter and no Filter. Experimental results show that this frame-
work can notably improve the overall classification accu-
Water Settlement Forest racy. As the study was carried out on three class labels,
Water 100.00 0.00 0.00 settlement shows a significant improvement in classification
Actual
Settlement 0.00 90.18 9.82 accuracy while forest shows only a marginal improvement.
Values
Forest 0.11 15.12 84.77 With the improvement in classification accuracy, the study
also exhibits the effectiveness of transforming the image in
frequency domain to despeckle the SAR image.

56

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 6. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
This work is funded by Visvesvaraya PhD Scheme, Ministry
of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of
India. The authors are grateful to JAXA for providing sam-
ple imagery of ALOS-PALSAR-2 dataset used in this work.
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