Speckle noise is a common phenomenon in SAR images. The reduction of Speckle is necessary for any further processing of SAR image such as segmentation

classification and other procedures for information extraction. ln this paper

after a brief review of conventional filters for SAR speckle reduction

a wavelet-based soft-thresholding filter for SAR speckle reduction is presented. To evaluate the performance of this filter

the adaptive local statistics filters

which include Lee

Frost

Enhanced Lee

Enhanced Frost

Kuan

and the Gamma-Map filter

are applied to the speckle reduction for the same type SAR image. The performances are compared in several aspects including Radiometric preservation

feature preservation

speckle reduction in the extended uniform regions and the absence of artifacts. The results show that the wavelet-based speckle reduction filter performs better in every aspect in evaluation than the conventional filters do.