A new edge detector based on an improved polarimetric whitening filter (PWF) for polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images is proposed

aiming at a better usage of polarimetric information and reducing the speckle noise. The covariance matrices of the background and the center in PWF are replaced by those at both sides of the moving edge template. Polarimetric information including complex correlation between different polarizations is better utilized while speckle is suppressed at the same time. The new method is demonstrated using simulated and real polarimetric SAR data.