An approach for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image de-noising based on independent component analysis (ICA) basis images is proposed. Firstly, the basis images and the code matrix of the original image are obtained using ICA algorithm. Then, pointwise Holder exponent of each basis is computed as a cost criterion for basis enhancement, and then the enhanced basis images are classified into two sets according to a separation rule which separates the clean basis from the original basis. After these key procedures for speckle reduction, the clean image is finally obtained by reconstruction on the clean basis and original code matrix. The reconstructed image shows better visual perception and image quality compared with those obtained by other traditional techniques.