A non-local approach for SAR and interferometric SAR denoising

Abstract

Recently, non-local approaches have proved very powerful for image denoising. Unlike local filters, the non-local (NL) means introduced in decrease the noise while preserving well the resolution. In the proposed paper, we suggest the use of a non-local approach to estimate single-look SAR reflectivity images or to construct SAR interferograms. SAR interferogram construction refers to the joint estimation of the reflectivity, phase difference and coherence image from a pair of two co-registered single-look complex SAR images. The weighted-maximum likelihood is introduced as a generalization of the weighted average performed in the NL means. We propose to set the weights according to the probability of similarity which provides an extension of the Euclidean distance used in the NL means. Experiments and results are presented to show the efficiency of the proposed approach.