Performance evaluation of integer to integer wavelet transform for synthetic aperture radar image compression

Synthetic aperture radar image compression using tree-structured edge-directed orthogonal wavelet packet transform

This paper proposes a novel method on Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Image denoising, which is based on context modeling combined with multiscale orthogonal bandlet coefficients. For the main influence of SAR image is multiplicative speckle noise, the logarithm uniform transform is used to convert it to additive noise. In this paper, the multiscale orthogonal bandlet transform is applied to noisy SAR Image. The contextual model is used to compute contextual values of bandlet coefficients on each scale. Therefore, bandlet coefficients are reconstructed into some parts by contextual values. The spatially adaptive soft-threshold (T) is to denoise SAR image in each part. Experimental results demonstrate that this method outperforms the methods of Ehance-Lee (E-lee), contextual model based on wavelet domain (Wavelet-context), and Hidden Markov Tree model bases on wavelet domain (Wavelet-hmt) on there indexes: Floating index (FI), Standard deviation and Edge saving index of vertical direction, by using a real SAR image. However, the method can not only reduce the speckle noise but also preserve edges and high frequency information, and gets considerable visual effect on SAR Image denoising.

Ocean vessels and aircrafts usually cause large oscillated responses and span a high dynamic range (HDR) in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. To visualize and further recognize these objects on common display devices, it is necessary to compress the HDR at the proper ratio and enhance the details at both low and high grey levels. To achieve this goal, an adaptive two-scale enhancement method is proposed. First, to enhance the details at low grey levels, an adaptive global HDR compression algorithm is designed based on the grey-level distribution feature. Then, with a simplified heterogeneity measurement based on the weighted standard deviation and entropy at a local scale, high-backscattering objects are determined and enhanced to highlight their peak details at high grey levels. The proposed method is validated using two different types of HDR SAR images, and the experimental results suggest that the proposed method visualizes the information at all grey levels and enhances the object’s local peaks. Compared with gamma mapping algorithms, which are widely used for SAR image display, the proposed method outperforms in visualizing the details of man-made objects in very high resolution SAR images.

The appearance of multiplicative speckle noise in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery makes it very difficult to visualization and compression. This paper proposes a novel framework of Compressed Sensing (CS) to compress the SAR image. It combined the Nonsubsampled Contourlet Transform (NSCT) shrinkage method to SAR image sparse represent. And a modified Smoothed L0 norm (SL0) algorithm is used for SAR image accurate reconstruction. The experimental results show the proposed method is very effective and can get better reconstruction performances.

With the bandwidth restriction in airborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR)-based human-in-the-loop applications, the acquired SAR images should be compressed with loss to overcome the conflict of image quantity and the response time. In this paper we described a framework of SAR image compression. The SAR image is decomposed into two components, namely structural and textural components. The target region mask is used to retain the important target information by allocating more bits during compression, while less bits is allocated for the background region. The obtained result showed that the compressed image using the proposed algorithm has better visual effect under the same bit rate compared with JPEG2000 algorithm.

With the bandwidth restriction in airborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR)-based human-in-the-loop applications, the acquired SAR images should be compressed with loss to overcome the conflict of image quantity and the response time. In this letter a framework of SAR image compression is described. The SAR image is decomposed into two components, namely structural and textural components. The target region mask is used to retain the important target information by allocating more bits during compression, while less bits is allocated for the background region. The obtained results show that the compressed image using the proposed algorithm has better visual effect under the same bit rate compared with JPEG2000 algorithm.

The usage of a hypersonic platform for remote sensing application has promising prospects, especially for hypersonic platform-borne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging. However, the high-speed of hypersonic platform will lead to extreme friction between the platform and air, which will cause the ionization of air. The ionized gas forms the plasma sheath wrapped around the hypersonic platform. The plasma sheath will severely affect the propagation of SAR signal and further affect the SAR imaging. Therefore, hypersonic platform-borne SAR imaging should be studied from a physical perspective. In this paper, hypersonic platform-borne SAR imaging under plasma sheath is analyzed. The SAR signal propagation in plasma sheath is computed using scatter matrix method. The proposed SAR signal model is verified by using a ground experiment system. Moreover, the effect of attenuation caused by plasma sheath on SAR imaging is studied under different SAR parameters and plasma sheath. The result shows that attenuation caused by plasma sheath will degrade the SAR imaging quality and even cause the point and area targets to be submerged into the noise. The real SAR images under plasma sheath also illustrate this phenomenon. Furthermore, by studying imaging results under different SAR and plasma parameters, it can be concluded that the severe degradation of SAR imaging quality appears at condition of high plasma sheath electron density and low SAR carrier frequency. The work in this paper will be beneficial for the study of hypersonic platform-borne SAR imaging and design of hypersonic SAR imaging systems in the future.

In general, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging and image processing are two sequential steps in SAR image processing. Due to the large size of SAR images, most image processing algorithms require image segmentation before processing. However, the existence of speckle noise in SAR images, as well as poor contrast and the uneven distribution of gray values in the same target, make SAR images difficult to segment. In order to facilitate the subsequent processing of SAR images, this paper proposes a new method that combines the back-projection algorithm (BPA) and a first-order gradient operator to enhance the edges of SAR images to overcome image segmentation problems. For complex-valued signals, the gradient operator was applied directly to the imaging process. The experimental results of simulated images and real images validate our proposed method. For the simulated scene, the supervised image segmentation evaluation indexes of our method have more than 1.18%, 11.2% and 11.72% improvement on probabilistic Rand index (PRI), variability index (VI), and global consistency error (GCE). The proposed imaging method will make SAR image segmentation and related applications easier.

This paper presents a new wavelet transform coding algorithm for complex Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image compression. It uses a improved recursive set-partitioning procedure to compress the large blocks which are abundant in zero bits, and uses entropy coding based on adaptive context prediction model to compress the small blocks which contains non-zero bits. The experiment results showed that the new algorithm gained better compression efficiency than SPECK. We also compared with common complex SAR image compression algorithm in references using professional parameters in SAR, such as Means Phase Errors (MPE), complex spatial correlation efficient, the new algorithm gets better performances too.

We address the application of model-supported exploitation techniques to synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery. The emphasis is on monitoring SAR imagery using wide area 2D and/or 3D site models along with contextual information. We consider here the following tasks useful in monitoring: (a) site model construction using segmentation and labeling techniques, (b) target detection, (c) target classification and indexing, and (d) SAR image-site model registration. The 2-D wide area site models used here for SAR image exploitation differ from typical site models developed for RADIUS applications, in that they do not model specific facilities, but constitute wide area site models of cultural features such as urban clutter areas, roads, clearings, fields, etc. These models may be derived directly from existing site models, possibly constructed from electro-optical (EO) observations. When such models are not available, a set of segmentation and labeling techniques described here can be used for the construction of 2D site models. The use of models can potentially yield critical information which can disambiguate target signatures in SAR images. We address registration of SAR and EO images to a common site model. Specific derivations are given for the case of registration within the RCDE platform. We suggest a constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detection scheme and a topographic primal sketch (TPS) based classification scheme for monitoring target occurrences in SAR images. The TPS of an observed target is matched against candidate targets TPSs synthesized for the preferred target orientation, inferred from context (e.g. road or parking lot targets). Experimental results on real and synthetic SAR images are provided.

In single band and single polarized synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images, the information is limited to intensity and texture only and it is very difficult to interpret such SAR images without any a priori information. For unsupervised classification of SAR images, M-band wavelet decomposition is performed on the SAR image and sub-band selection on the basis of energy levels is applied to improve the classification results since sparse representation of sub-bands degrades the performance of classification. Then, textural features are obtained from selected sub-bands and integrated with intensity features. An adaptive neuro-fuzzy algorithm is used to improve computational efficiency by extracting significant features. K-means classification is performed on the extracted features and land features are labeled. This classification algorithm involves user defined parameters. To remove the user dependency and to obtain maximum achievable classification accuracy, an algorithm is developed in this paper for classification accuracy in terms of the parameters involved in the segmentation process. This is very helpful to develop the automated land-cover monitoring system with SAR, where optimized parameters are to be identified only once and these parameters can be applied to SAR imagery of the same scene obtained year after year. A single band, single polarized SAR image is classified into water, urban and vegetation areas using this method and overall classification accuracy is obtained in the range of 85.92%–93.70% by comparing with ground truth data.

A novel three-step method to reduce speckle in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images is presented. First, an edge detector is used to detect the edge orientations in SAR images. Second, using a data processing method named empirical mode decomposition, the SAR image is smoothed along four directions: horizontal, vertical, left diagonal and right diagonal, respectively. Third, the SAR image is reconstructed such that if the edge direction is horizontal, the pixel smoothed along the horizontal direction is used to reconstruct the image, and so on; if an edge is not detected, the mean of the four directionally smoothed images is used to reconstruct the image. Application of this method to SAR images has shown that it is well balanced in the quality of visual appearance, mean preservation, edge preservation, and reduction of the standard deviation.

ABSTRACTThe speckle noise of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images limits its application in change detection. Compared with improved ratio (IR) and log-ratio (LR) operators, the neighborhood-based ratio (NR) technique can restrain the influence of speckle noise and is more suitable for change detection in SAR images. However, we find three drawbacks of NR by analyzing this method carefully. To overcome these defects, we propose an improved neighborhood-based ratio (INR) approach for change detection in SAR images. INR restructures the NR operator to exploit the neighborhood information more reasonably and is expected to reduce the impact of speckle noise better. IR, LR, mean ratio operator, NR, and INR are tested on two data sets to compare their performances in change detection of SAR images. Experimental results show that the proposed method can obtain better difference image than other state-of-art methods and improve the accuracy of change detection in SAR images effectively.

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image edge detection is one of the important steps for earth observation and target recognition,and it is recognized a difficult problem by domestic and foreign researchers because of the presence of speckle noise. A study was undertaken in this paper to speckle noise suppression and edge detail holding for SAR image edge detection, and we present an intelligent edge detection approach based on fuzzy theory and information fusion. Some typical SAR images were selected for edge detection using this approach in order to verify the result of relevant speckle noise suppression and edge detail holding. Results shows that this method can effectively inhibit the SAR image speckle noise and has smart edge detection ability. Unlike classical SAR image edge detection methods, this approach is a comprehensive integrated of different intelligent information processing methods, and it shows good robustness and universality.

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image segmentation is the key to SAR image automatic interpretation. However, speckle noise, intensity inhomogeneity, and irregular shaped objects with changing edge often make the SAR image segmentation very difficult, and existing algorithms have high computational complexity. We propose a region-based level set method using the local image intensity information. To represent the statistical characteristics of speckle noise, we first use a gamma statistical distribution to model every segmented SAR image. We then apply a modified region mean estimation formula to efficiently segment SAR images with inhomogeneity. Finally, Gaussian filtering is employed to regularize the level set function, which can avoid reinitialization. The experimental results on synthetic and real-world SAR images demonstrate that the proposed method has less computation cost, faster convergence rate, and more accurate segmentation results.