Polarimetric SAR Image Filtering Based on Patch Ordering and Simultaneous Sparse Coding

Abstract

In this paper, a transform-domain filtering method is proposed for polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (POLSAR) images via patch ordering and simultaneous sparse coding (SSC). First of all, we establish a signal-dependent additive noise model for the POLSAR covariance matrix and derive the noise variance for each element of the matrix based on the complex Wishart distribution. Next, we propose an extended patch ordering algorithm for POLSAR images by extracting sliding patches and organizing them in a regular way. Then, the ordered patches are filtered by SSC, for the purpose of which we develop a new weighted simultaneous orthogonal matching pursuit algorithm by embedding the signal-dependent noise model of the POLSAR data. Finally, the filtering result is reconstructed from the filtered patches via inverse permutation and subimage averaging. Experimental results with both simulated and real POLSAR images demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve state-of-the-art filtering performance.