A Blind SAR Image Despeckling Method Based on Improved Weighted Nuclear Norm Minimization

Abstract

Coherent imaging of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems generates multiplicative speckle noise, severely impairs SAR images’ interpretability. Although numerous despeckling methods have been proposed over the past three decades, SAR despeckling remains an unsolved problem due to its uniqueness and complexity. To address these issues, we propose a novel SAR image despeckling method based on the framework of weighted nuclear norm minimization (WNNM). First, a Gaussian function is used to approximate the distribution of good similar patches (GSP). Clustering is then used to select the optimal patches for the GSP matrix. WNNM can then estimate the underlying clean component of the GSP matrix. To increase the speed of the WNNM, a modified version of the singular value decomposition (SVD) is introduced. Additionally, we developed a noise variance estimation method that enables blind despeckling with the proposed method. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method yields superior objective indices and subjective visual inspection.