Patch ordering based SAR image despeckling via SSC and wavelet thresholding

Abstract

Processing of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images has led to the development of SAR image despeckling approaches. These approaches help to suppress the Speckle in SAR Image. In this paper, we propose a Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image despeckling method based on patch ordering and transform domain filtering. The proposed method consists of two-stage filtering strategy. The first stage is coarse filtering. In this stage, denoising is done by simultaneous Sparse Coding (SSC). The second stage is refined filtering which can eliminate small artifacts generated by the coarse filtering. In this stage, filtered image is obtained by Wavelet Hard thresholding. Experimental results with both denoised images and SAR images demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-art despeckling performance in terms of Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM), Peak Signalto-Noise Ratio (PSNR).