SAR despeckling using a modified wavelet-domain statistic model

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images are inherently affected by a signal multiplicative noise known as speckle, which is due to the radar wave coherence. In this paper, we introduce a new method to reduce speckle noise in SAR images, based on statistical modeling of wavelet coefficients. We use two-dimensional generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (GARCH) model for statistical modeling of images wavelet coefficients. By using this model, we are capable of taking into account important characteristics of wavelet coefficients, such as heavy tailed marginal distribution, and the dependencies between the coefficients. Furthermore, we use maximum a-posteriori (MAP) estimator for estimating the clean image wavelet coefficients. Finally, we compare our proposed method with some denoising methods, and quantify the achieved performance improvement.

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.

An efficient despeckling method is proposed based on stationary wavelet transform (SWT) for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. The statistical model of wavelet coefficients is analyzed and its performance is modeled with a mixture density of two zero-mean Gaussian distributions. A fuzzy shrinkage factor is derived based on the minimum mean error (MMSE) criteria with bayesian estimation. In this case, the ideas of region division and fuzzy shrinkage are adopted according to the interscale dependencies among wavelet coefficients. The noise-free wavelet coefficients are estimated accurately. Experimental results show that our method outperforms the refined Lee filterwavelet soft thresholding shrinkage and SWT shrinkage algorithms in terms of smoothing effects and edges preservation.

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.

The availability of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data offers great potential for environmental monitoring due to the insensitiveness of SAR imagery to atmospheric and sun- light-illumination conditions. In addition, the short revisit time provided by future SAR-based missions will allow a huge amount of multitemporal SAR data to become systematically available for monitoring applications. In this paper, the problem of detecting the changes that occurred on the ground by analyzing SAR im- agery is addressed by a completely unsupervised approach, i.e., by developing an automatic thresholding technique. The image- ratioing approach to SAR change detection is adopted, and the Kittler and Illingworth minimum-error thresholding algorithm is generalized to take into account the non-Gaussian distribution of the amplitude values of SAR images. In particular, a SAR-specific parametric modeling approach for the ratio image is proposed and integrated into the thresholding process. Experimental results, which confirm the accuracy of the method for real X-band SAR and spaceborne imaging radar C-band images, are presented.

Compressed sensing (CS) is currently utilized in the application of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imaging. Unfortunately, the CS SAR imaging performance degrades as SNR decreases. However, there exists a denoising convolutional neural network (DnCNN) based on 2D convolution (DnCNN-2D) in the field of image denoising. Traditional DnCNN-2D is not directly applicable to SAR imaging. Thus, a DnCNN based on 1D convolution (DnCNN-1D) for signal denoising is proposed and employed to denoise the SAR signal. The denoised SAR signal is subsequently utilized for CS SAR imaging. Each convolutional layer of DnCNN-1D has a fixed number and fixed size of filters and activation functions. The residual learning strategy and batch normalization are adopted in the DnCNN-1D. The segmental signal-to-noise ratio (SEGSNR) and the normalized mean square error (NMSE) are selected to evaluate signal denoising and SAR imaging performance, respectively. The experimental results indicate that imaging performance is significantly improved after denoising the SAR signal by the proposed method.

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 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.

As synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data is more and more popular in recent days, the fusion of SAR and optical image become inevitable and desirable problem. Image Registration is the fundamental for data fusion, and has been wildly studied. However, literature on registration between SAR and optical image remain little, which means the problem is still challenge and open. On one hand, the SAR and optical image are from totally different sensor with variant imaging mechanism. On the other hand, Simple features could not enough to maintain the accuracy and efficiency of multi-modal registration. We propose a new method for SAR and optical image registration. Different from current methods mainly based on intensity feature or point feature, our method matches two images by their boundary features. A globalized boundary detection algorithm are used for feature extraction. The extracted boundaries were then matched by coherence point drift algorithm. Experiments prove that our method could achieve pixel-level precision, and perform robust for different resolutions.

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.

In this paper, we propose a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image change detection algorithm based on SAR image nonstationary analysis and conditional random field (CRF) model. This algorithm segments the SAR images into two nonstationary regions with the Triplet Markov Field (TMF) model which incorporates a U field to describe the images' nonstationary nature. The combined posterior probability of the CRF model consists of two parts: the unary potential and the pairwise potential. The unary potential is modeled by support vector machine (SVM) using the texture features extracted from the two-temporal SAR images, and the pairwise potential is constructed by the multilevel logistical model to capture the spatial interactions of the log-ratio image. Both the unary and pairwise potentials are improved with the introduction of the U field. The parameters of the pairwise potential are estimated by the iterative conditional estimation (ICE) algorithm. The iterative conditional model (ICM) algorithm is utilized for updating the combined posterior probability, and the final change detection results are obtained when it converges. Finally, experimental results on four two-temporal SAR images validate the effectiveness of the proposed image change detection algorithm.

It is expensive and time-consuming to obtain a large number of labeled synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. In the task of small training data size, the results of target detection on SAR images using deep network approaches are usually not ideal. In this study, considering that optical remote sensing images are much easier to be labeled than SAR images, we assume to have a large number of labeled optical remote sensing images and a small number of labeled SAR images with the similar scenes, propose to transfer knowledge from optical remote sensing images to SAR images, and develop a domain adaptive Faster R-CNN for SAR target detection with small training data size. In the proposed method, in order to make full use of the label information and realize more accurate domain adaptation knowledge transfer, an instance level domain adaptation constraint is used rather than feature level domain adaptation constraint. Specifically, generative adversarial network (GAN) constraint is applied as the domain adaptation constraint in the adaptation module after the proposals of Faster R-CNN to achieve instance level domain adaptation and learn the transferable features. The experimental results on the measured SAR image dataset show that the proposed method has higher detection accuracy in the task of SAR target detection with small training data size than the traditional Faster R-CNN.

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.

Recognition of occluded objects in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images is a significant problem for automatic target recognition. In this paper, we present a hidden Markov modeling (HMM) based approach for recognizing objects in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. We identify the peculiar characteristics of SAR sensors and using these characteristics we develop feature based multiple models for a given SAR image of an object. The models exploiting the relative geometry of feature locations or the amplitude of SAR radar return are based on sequentialization of scattering centers extracted from SAR images. In order to improve performance we integrate these models synergistically using their probabalistic estimates for recognition of a particular target at a specific azimuth. Experimental results are presented using both synthetic and real SAR images.

The inherent speckle noise in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images severely degrades the image interpretation and affects the follow-up image-processing tasks. Thus, speckle suppression is a critical step in SAR image preprocessing. We propose a novel locally adaptive speckle reduction algorithm based on Bayesian maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation in wavelet domain. First, the presented method performs logarithmical transform to original speckled SAR image and an undecimated wavelet transform (UWT). The Rayleigh distribution is used to model the statistics of the speckle wavelet coefficients, and the Laplacian distribution models the statistics of wavelet coefficients due to signal. A Bayesian estimator with a closed-form solution is derived from MAP criterion estimation, and the resulting formula is proved to be equivalent to soft thresholding in nature, which makes our algorithm very simple. Furthermore, the parameters of the Laplacian model are estimated from the coefficients in a neighboring window, thus making the presented method spatially adaptive in the wavelet domain. Theoretical analysis and simulation experiment results show that the proposed method is simple and effective. It significantly improves the visual quality of the SAR images and yields better performance than spatial filterings and traditional wavelet despeckling algorithms.