An Advanced SAR Image Despeckling Method by Bernoulli-Sampling-Based Self-Supervised Deep Learning

Abstract

As one of the main sources of remote sensing big data, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) can provide all-day and all-weather Earth image acquisition. However, speckle noise in SAR images brings a notable limitation for its big data applications, including image analysis and interpretation. Deep learning has been demonstrated as an advanced method and technology for SAR image despeckling. Most existing deep-learning-based methods adopt supervised learning and use synthetic speckled images to train the despeckling networks. This is because they need clean images as the references, and it is hard to obtain purely clean SAR images in real-world conditions. However, significant differences between synthetic speckled and real SAR images cause the domain gap problem. In other words, they cannot show superior performance for despeckling real SAR images as they do for synthetic speckled images. Inspired by recent studies on self-supervised denoising, we propose an advanced SAR image despeckling method by virtue of Bernoulli-sampling-based self-supervised deep learning, called SSD-SAR-BS. By only using real speckled SAR images, Bernoulli-sampled speckled image pairs (input–target) were obtained as the training data. Then, a multiscale despeckling network was trained on these image pairs. In addition, a dropout-based ensemble was introduced to boost the network performance. Extensive experimental results demonstrated that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art for speckle noise suppression on both synthetic speckled and real SAR datasets (i.e., Sentinel-1 and TerraSAR-X).