SAR Image Despeckling Via Structural Sparse Representation

A novel synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image despeckling method based on structural sparse representation is introduced. The proposed method utilizes the fact that different regions in SAR images correspond to varying terrain reflectivity. Therefore, SAR images can be split into a heterogeneous class (with a varied terrain reflectivity) and a homogeneous class (with a constant terrain reflectivity). In the proposed method, different sparse representation based despeckling schemes are designed by combining the different region characteristics in SAR images. For heterogeneous regions with rich structure and texture information, structural dictionaries are learned to appropriately represent varied structural characteristics. Specifically, each patch in these regions is sparsely coded with the best fitted structural dictionary, thus good structure preservation can be obtained. For homogenous regions without rich structure and texture information, the highly redundant photometric self-similarity is exploited to suppress speckle noise without introducing artifacts. That is achieved by firstly learning the sub-dictionary, then simultaneously sparsely coding for each group of photometrically similar image patches. Visual and objective experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over the-state-of-the-art methods. © 2016, Springer Science+Business Media New York.