Blind estimation of speckle variance in synthetic aperture radar images

A task of blind estimation of multiplicative noise (speckle) variance in multi-look images acquired by radars with synthesized aperture array is considered. It is shown that there are several factors affecting accuracy of such estimation. The main of them are spatial correlation of the speckle, complexity of an analyzed image and peculiarities of a method used. Spatial and spectral domain approaches are analyzed. It is shown that for both approaches spatial correlation of the speckle is to be estimated and taken into account. Results for real life TerraSAR-X data are presented as illustrations and for analyzing methods' accuracy.