Variational method of speckle reduction and boundary detection in SAR imagery

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images have been widely used in remote sensing applications. However, the SAR image contains speckle noise. In this paper, we propose a variational method to delineate the boundary of objects in SAR images. It is implemented by two steps: The first step is speckle reduction and the second step is boundary detection. The two steps are implemented with a unified frame of energy minimization. In each step, we define an energy functional, and the corresponding minimizer of the functional is regarded as the result. An ERS-2 PRecision Image (PRI) over Proserpine area in Australia is used to demonstrate the algorithm. The results of both steps appear to be very promising.