Multi-stage Image Restoration for High Resolution Panchromatic Imagery

In the satellite remote sensing, the operational environment of the satellite sensor causes image degradation during the image acquisition. The degradation results in noise and blurring which badly affect identification and extraction of useful information in image data. Especially, the degradation gives bad influence in the analysis of images collected over the scene with complicate surface structure such as urban area. This study proposes a multi-stage image restoration to improve the accuracy of detailed analysis for the images collected over the complicate scene. The proposed method assumes a Gaussian additive noise, Markov random field of spatial continuity, and blurring proportional to the distance between the pixels. Point-Jacobian Iteration Maximum A Posteriori (PJI-MAP) estimation is employed to restore a degraded image. The multi-stage process includes the image segmentation performing region merging after pixel-linking. A dissimilarity coefficient combining homogeneity and contrast is proposed for image segmentation. In this study, the proposed method was quantitatively evaluated using simulation data and was also applied to the two panchromatic images of super-high resolution: Dubaisat-2 data of 1m resolution from LA, USA and KOMPSAT3 data of 0.7 m resolution from Daejeon in the Korean peninsula. The experimental results imply that it can improve analytical accuracy in the application of remote sensing high resolution panchromatic imagery.