Restoration of speckle noise corrupted SAR images using regularization by denoising

Abstract

Speckle noise removal is a well-established problem in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image processing. Among different methods focused on the reconstruction of SAR images, variational models have achieved state-of-the-art performance. In this paper, a Rayleigh based speckle reduction algorithm is developed using the variational framework. The forward model is combined with recently proposed regularization by denoising (RED) prior. However, RED has been proposed in literature for the additive noise model. Multiplicative noise in SAR images prevents the direct application of RED to variational models. Hence, logarithm transformation is applied to change the multiplicative noise model to additive model, and the forward model from Rayleigh to Fisher–Tippett distribution. The resulting optimization problem is solved using the alternating direction method of multipliers. Further, the proof of the convergence analysis is carried out for the above framework. Simulations convey that the proposed method has better despeckling performance compared to that of state-of-the-art methods.