The Effect of SAR Speckle Removal in SAR-Optical Image Fusion

Due to the imaging mechanism of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and the noise in the images, visual identification of objects in the scene is not as easy as in optical images. SAR images have limited color information and cannot reflect the spectral information of objects. Optical images, on the other hand, have rich spectral information. SAR-Optical image fusion is an important area of study so that SAR data can be easily evaluated by anyone, but it is difficult to find a matching SAR and optical image of the same scene. In order to overcome this difficulty, Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 datasets have been published and image fusion studies have been carried out with various methods. However, it has been observed that the effect of SAR noise removal before merging on image fusion methods has not been investigated. In the studies conducted to investigate this effect, five different fusion algorithms used in the literature were tested with twenty different image groups using different noise reduction ratios. The success of the fusion results obtained was compared with five different metrics that are widely used in the literature. The images and metric results obtained as a result of the tests showed that the removal of speckle noise in the SAR data has a positive effect on the fusion results.