Speckle noise is an intrinsic property of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery. The demand for speckle reduction of SAR images is to smooth the speckle noise while preserving the structure information of the original images. Existing speckle suppression methods possess respective merits and drawbacks

without universal adaptability. Integrating the statistical characteristic of speckle noise in SAR images with wavelet domain hidden Markov models (HMMs) structure of images

we propose a new wavelet domain speckle reduction method. Simulation and experimental results using real data show that the proposed method is able to effectively suppress speckle noise and to better retain edge structure. Compared with wavelet domain soft thresholding denoising algorithm and Lee multiplicative speckle filter

the wavelet domain HMMs method offers significant improvements on smoothing speckle and preserving edge. In addition

the proposed method also gets a better visual effect.