Effect of Non-Local Means Filter in a Homomorphic Framework Cascaded with Bacterial Foraging Optimization to Eliminate Speckle

Speckle is a kind of multiplicative noise which degrades the image quality and is present in coherent imaging systems. The primary goal of speckle reduction is to removethe speckle without losing much detail contained in an image.To achieve this goal, in this paper, a new technique is proposed for speckle denoising by the use of a Non-Local Means Filter in a homomorphic framework and a bio-inspired optimization technique to reduce speckle while preserving finer details. The statistical results of simulations are done using Matlab and its analysis is presented to demonstrate the advantages and disadvantages of the proposed technique over other standard speckle filters. Thus the speckle denoising technique so developed eliminates the speckle noise and significantly improves the image quality.