SAR Image Despeckling with Adaptive Multiscale Products Based on Directionlet Transform

• Main Authors: Yixiang Lu, Qingwei Gao, Dong Sun, Dexiang Zhang
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Hindawi Limited 2013-01-01
• Series: Mathematical Problems in Engineering
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2013/197159

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images are inherently affected by multiplicative speckle noise generated by radar coherent wave. In this paper, a new despeckling algorithm based on directionlets using multiscale products is proposed. We first take an anisotropic directionlet transform on the logarithmically transformed SAR images and multiply the coefficients at adjacent scales to enhance the details of image under consideration. Then, different from traditional thresholding methods, a threshold is applied to the multiscale products of the directionlet coefficients to suppress noise. Since the multiplication amplifies the significant features of signal and dilute noise, the proposed method reduces noise effectively while preserving edge structures. Finally, we compare the performance of the proposed algorithm with other despeckling methods applied to synthetic image and real SAR images. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in SAR images despeckling.