Abstract
Speckle in SAR imagery is a by-product of constructive and destructive interference between scatterers within a
resolution cell. This speckle phenomenon gives SAR imagery a "noise-like" appearance and is often exploited in near
angle and/or coherent stereo pairs. However, in many cases, this speckle is unwanted and can be considered noise or
interference. We use partial differential equation (PDE) methods for speckle mitigation in detected imagery and the
collected complex image data. In particular, we study the effects of non-linear anisotropic diffusion filters on collected
SAR image data. In the past, anisotropic diffusion (AD) techniques have been successfully used in the analysis of EO
data. However, the use of these techniques on SAR image data is recent and much is yet to be done. We expect the
application of AD techniques on SAR image data in combination with a fluid dynamic perspective to yield rich
dividends in terms of image interpretability. Through our approach we demonstrate that it is possible to spatially
maintain areas of high dynamic range (bright scatterers) and smooth areas of low dynamic range in the scene. We also
exhibit the role of these non-linear filters in correlation, registration, compression, decompression, and image
interpretability for SAR analysts.
