Image Destriping Research Articles

Remote Sensing Image Destriping by an ℓ₀-Based Nonconvex Model With Overlapping Group Sparse Hyper-Laplacian Prior

Remote Sensing Image Destriping by an <i>ℓ</i>₀-Based Nonconvex Model With Overlapping Group Sparse Hyper-Laplacian Prior

Hyperspectral image destriping and denoising from a task decomposition view

The generalized mathematical model for HSI denoising or destriping lacks stability and uniqueness properties, failing to accurately portray the distribution and effects of stripes. Solutions following such a model would inevitably result in excessive destriping of strip-free areas, leading to the loss of texture detail. To remedy the above deficiencies, we reformulate the destriping task and introduce a novel solution from the task decomposition view. It is broken down into auxiliary sub-tasks involving stripe mask detection, stripe intensity estimation, and HSI restoration, which greatly reduces the difficulty of solving such an ill-posed problem. Based on this, we adopt a sequential multi-task learning framework and propose a stripes location-dependent restoration network, termed SLDR, which integrates the distribution and intensity features of stripes to achieve accurate destriping and high-fidelity restoration. Furthermore, we design a stripe attribute-aware estimator and a weighted total variation loss function to capture the unique properties of stripes and adaptively adjust the restoration weights of striped and non-striped regions. Extensive evaluation and comprehensive ablation studies on synthetic and practical scenes show the effectiveness and superiority of our model and architecture.

Column-Spatial Correction Network for Remote Sensing Image Destriping

The stripe noise in the multispectral remote sensing images, possibly resulting from the instrument instability, slit contamination, and light interference, significantly degrades the imaging quality and impairs high-level visual tasks. The local consistency of homogeneous region in striped images is damaged because of the different gains and offsets of adjacent sensors regarding the same ground object, which leads to the structural characteristics of stripe noise. This can be characterized by the increased differences between columns in the remote sensing image. Therefore, the destriping can be viewed as a process of improving the local consistency of homogeneous region and the global uniformity of whole image. In recent years, convolutional neural network (CNN)-based models have been introduced to destriping tasks, and have achieved advanced results, relying on their powerful representation ability. Therefore, to effectively leverage both CNNs and the structural characteristics of stripe noise, we propose a multi-scaled column-spatial correction network (CSCNet) for remote sensing image destriping, in which the local structural characteristic of stripe noise and the global contextual information of the image are both explored at multiple feature scales. More specifically, the column-based correction module (CCM) and spatial-based correction module (SCM) were designed to improve the local consistency and global uniformity from the perspectives of column correction and full image correction, respectively. Moreover, a feature fusion module based on the channel attention mechanism was created to obtain discriminative features derived from different modules and scales. We compared the proposed model against both traditional and deep learning methods on simulated and real remote sensing images. The promising results indicate that CSCNet effectively removes image stripes and outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of qualitative and quantitative assessments.

On-Orbit Real-Time Variational Image Destriping: FPGA Architecture and Implementation

On-orbit real-time image processing is of increasing demands due to requirements for quick-response missions. Image destriping is usually an important pre-processing step to improve image quality in practice. The unidirectional variational models have shown impressive destriping performance. However, they are not easy for real-time implementation for high-computation complexity and there are few attempts for hardware implementation. This article is the first hardware implementation of variational image destriping algorithm, which achieves high throughput for large-swath remote-sensing images. In this article, a fully pipelined hardware architecture is proposed. First, the involved iteration loop is unrolled and a coarse-grained parallelism is obtained. Second, for each deployed iteration computation blocks (ICBs), a dedicated timing arrangement is designed to alleviate the bottleneck caused by the data dependency within each ICB, obtaining a fine-grained parallelism. Moreover, to further optimize the critical path, an approximate simplification scheme is proposed, saving the resource usage and reducing computing delay. The proposed architecture is implemented and verified on a XILINX 6vcx240t field programmable gate array (FPGA); it achieves a maximum frame rate up to 41.9 frames/s with delay of only tens of row cycles for 8-bit <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${{2048}} \times {{2048}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> images. It performs all the processing on the pixels in raster scan order on- the-fly as they are being transmitted from camera payload, which significantly facilitates on- orbit real-time processing of large-swath remote-sensing images with high data rate.

Statistical Destriping of Pushbroom-Type Images Based on an Affine Detector Response

Remote sensing pushbroom-type imaging systems acquire entire columns of an image with a single detector. As a consequence, the miss-calibration of the detectors produces stripes on the image. In this context, this paper introduces a new self-calibration destriping method based on an affine response model for the detectors, called Statistical Affine Destriping (SAD). In contrast, some previous contributions were limited to a purely linear model, while many others only considered an additive structured noise model. It is based on the maximum a posteriori estimation of the gain and offset parameters attached to each detector given the observed image. Simple statistical prior assumptions are adopted: respectively, a Gaussian white noise model for the gains and offsets, and a first-order, homogeneous Markov model for the observed scene. Based on a simplification of the posterior likelihood, we propose a very efficient optimization scheme based on a constrained Majorize-Minimize principle, allowing us to process large dimension images. Moreover, simple empirical rules are given to tune the hyperparameters of the destriping method for high-resolution PLEIADES-type images. Compared to the performance of a destriping method limited to gain correction, we observe that the new version provides reliable results in a wider range of situations. We also extend the method in two directions. On the one hand, we consider that some detectors may be atypical, with very high or very low gains or offsets. On the other hand, we extend the method to multispectral image destriping.

Automatic Detection and Correction of Random Telegraph Signal Artifacts in Earth Observation Images

Satellite optical and infrared images can be degraded by a piecewise-constant random artefact called Random Telegraph Signal (RTS), which is caused by unstable semiconductor defects in the photodetector. In this letter, we aim at proposing new techniques to detect and correct such artefacts in the specific context of push-broom detectors, where some columns exhibit RTS that superimposes with the landscape. Our detector is based on a nonparametric statistical test that compares the distribution of each column to its neighbors. Concerning the RTS correction, we first propose a signal processing method that estimates the levels and jumps of the RTS. Then we propose another method inspired by variational image destriping, which directly estimates the RTS through the use of total variation. Experiments -on Pléiades images with synthetic RTS and on a real SPOT-5 image- show the effectiveness of the proposed techniques.

A Remote Sensing Image Destriping Model Based on Low-Rank and Directional Sparse Constraint

Stripe noise is a common condition that has a considerable impact on the quality of the images. Therefore, stripe noise removal (destriping) is a tremendously important step in image processing. Since the existing destriping models cause different degrees of ripple effects, in this paper a new model, based on total variation (TV) regularization, global low rank and directional sparsity constraints, is proposed for the removal of vertical stripes. TV regularization is used to preserve details, and the global low rank and directional sparsity are used to constrain stripe noise. The directional and structural characteristics of stripe noise are fully utilized to achieve a better removal effect. Moreover, we designed an alternating minimization scheme to obtain the optimal solution. Simulation and actual experimental data show that the proposed model has strong robustness and is superior to existing competitive destriping models, both subjectively and objectively.

Hyperspectral Image Destriping and Denoising Using Stripe and Spectral Low-Rank Matrix Recovery and Global Spatial-Spectral Total Variation

Hyperspectral image (HSI) is easily corrupted by different kinds of noise, such as stripes, dead pixels, impulse noise, Gaussian noise, etc. Due to less consideration of the structural specificity of stripes, many existing HSI denoising methods cannot effectively remove the heavy stripes in mixed noise. In this paper, we classify the noise on HSI into three types: sparse noise, stripe noise, and Gaussian noise. The clean image and different types of noise are treated as independent components. In this way, the image denoising task can be naturally regarded as an image decomposition problem. Thanks to the structural characteristic of stripes and the low-rank property of HSI, we propose to destripe and denoise the HSI by using stripe and spectral low-rank matrix recovery and combine it with the global spatial-spectral TV regularization (SSLR-SSTV). By considering different properties of different HSI ingredients, the proposed method separates the original image from the noise components perfectly. Both simulation and real image denoising experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve a satisfactory denoising result compared with the state-of-the-art methods. Especially, it outperforms the other methods in the task of stripe noise removal visually and quantitatively.

Joint Analysis and Weighted Synthesis Sparsity Priors for Simultaneous Denoising and Destriping Optical Remote Sensing Images

Stripe and random noise are two different degradation phenomena that commonly coexist in optical remote sensing images, and they are often modeled as inverse problems. In model-based inverse problems, analysis and synthesis sparse representations (SSRs) are used as regularization terms to obtain approximate solutions due to their respective merits, i.e., the nonzero coefficients in SSR are usually used to describe an image, while the indexes of zeros in analysis sparse representation (ASR) are used to characterize the stripe. Inspired by these merits, we propose a unified variational framework, called a joint analysis and weighted synthesis (JAWS) sparsity model, to simultaneously separate the clean image and the stripe from a single optical remote sensing image. To solve the JAWS sparsity model efficiently, an alternating minimization optimization strategy is first employed to separate it into two subproblems that are used for different tasks. One called as weighted SSR (WSSR) is the main for optical remote sensing image denoising, which can be effectively solved by employing the weighted singular value thresholding operator, while the other called as ASR is the main approach for optical remote sensing image destriping, which is optimized by adopting the split Bregman iteration. By minimizing the two subproblems alternatively, the proposed JAWS sparsity model is efficiently solved. Finally, both quantitative and qualitative results of experiments on synthetic and real-world optical remote sensing images validate that the proposed approach is effective and even better than the state of the arts.

Destriping of Multispectral Remote Sensing Image Using Low-Rank Tensor Decomposition

Multispectral image (MSI) destriping is a challenging topic and has been attracting much research attention in remote sensing area due to its importance in improving the image qualities and subsequent applications. The existing destriping methods mainly focus on matrix-based modeling representation, which fails to fully discover the correlation of the stripe component in both spatial dimensions. In this paper, we propose a novel low-rank tensor decomposition framework based MSI destriping method by decomposing the striped image into the image component and stripe component. Specifically, for the image component, we use the anisotropic spatial unidirectional total variation (TV) and spectral TV regularization to enhance the piecewise smoothness in both spatial and spectral domains. Moreover, for the stripe component, we adopt tensor Tucker decomposition and $\ell _{2,1}$ -norm regularization to model the spatial correlation and group sparsity characteristic among all bands, respectively. An efficient algorithm using the augmented Lagrange multiplier method is designed to solve the proposed optimization model. Experiments under various cases of simulated data and real-world data demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model over the existing single-band and MSI destriping methods in terms of the qualitative and quantitative.

Directional ℓ0 Sparse Modeling for Image Stripe Noise Removal

Remote sensing images are often polluted by stripe noise, which leads to negative impact on visual performance. Thus, it is necessary to remove stripe noise for the subsequent applications, e.g., classification and target recognition. This paper commits to remove the stripe noise to enhance the visual quality of images, while preserving image details of stripe-free regions. Instead of solving the underlying image by variety of algorithms, we first estimate the stripe noise from the degraded images, then compute the final destriping image by the difference of the known stripe image and the estimated stripe noise. In this paper, we propose a non-convex ℓ 0 sparse model for remote sensing image destriping by taking full consideration of the intrinsically directional and structural priors of stripe noise, and the locally continuous property of the underlying image as well. Moreover, the proposed non-convex model is solved by a proximal alternating direction method of multipliers (PADMM) based algorithm. In addition, we also give the corresponding theoretical analysis of the proposed algorithm. Extensive experimental results on simulated and real data demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms recent competitive destriping methods, both visually and quantitatively.

Extremely Sparse Stripe Noise Removal From Nonremote-Sensing Images by Straight Line Detection and Neighborhood Grayscale Weighted Replacement

Traditional methods of stripe noise removal based on space domain or transformation domain generally cannot handle the case where the noise is extremely sparse. To solve this problem, we propose a novel approach to accurately detect and remove the stripe noise by analyzing the directional and structural information of the stripe noise. First, we build a preselected stripe noise lines set by using local progressive probabilistic Hough transform. Subsequently, the real stripe noise lines are screened out from this set according to the feature of grayscale discontinuities. Finally, our approach uses the strategy of neighborhood grayscale weighted replacement and a local Gaussian filter to perform image destriping. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach proposed in this paper outperforms other recent promising methods in terms of quantitative assessments, qualitative assessments, and computing time.

Remote Sensing Image Stripe Noise Removal: From Image Decomposition Perspective

Stripe noise removal (destriping) is a fundamental problem in remote sensing image processing that holds significant practical importance for subsequent applications. These variational destriping methods have obtained impressive results and attracted widely studied research interests. However, most of them are dedicated to estimate the clear image from the striped one, paying much attention to the image itself, while ignoring the structural characteristic of stripe, which would easily cause damages to the image structure and leave residual stripes in image recovery. In this paper, we treat the image and stripe components equally and convert the image destriping task as an image decomposition problem naturally. We first give a detailed analysis about the structural characteristic of stripes and the prior knowledge about the remote sensing images. Then, incorporating them, we propose a low-rank-based single-image decomposition model (LRSID) to separate the original image from the stripe component perfectly. This low-rank constraint for the stripe perfectly matches the fact that only parts of data vectors are corrupted but the others are not. Moreover, we further utilize the spectral information of the remote sensing images, and we extend our 2-D image decomposition method to the 3-D case. Extensive experiments on both simulated and real data have been carried out to validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithms.

Image Destriping Method based on Wavelet Transform

Image Destriping Method based on Wavelet Transform

Unidirectional total variation destriping using difference curvature in MODIS emissive bands

This paper presents a method of unidirectional total variation destriping using difference curvature in MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer) emissive bands. First, difference curvature is utilized to extract spatial information at each pixel; and the spatially weighted parameters that constructed by extracted spatial information are incorporated into the unidirectional total variation model to adaptively adjust the destriping strength for achieving a better destriping result and preserving the detail information meantime. Second, the split Bregman iteration method is employed to optimize the proposed model. Finally, experimental results from MODIS emissive bands and comparisons with other methods demonstrate the potential of the presented method for MODIS image destriping.

Graph-Regularized Low-Rank Representation for Destriping of Hyperspectral Images

Hyperspectral image destriping is a challenging and promising theme in remote sensing. Striping noise is a ubiquitous phenomenon in hyperspectral imagery, which may severely degrade the visual quality. A variety of methods have been proposed to effectively alleviate the effects of the striping noise. However, most of them fail to take full advantage of the high spectral correlation between the observation subimages in distinct bands and consider the local manifold structure of the hyperspectral data space. In order to remedy this drawback, in this paper, a novel graph-regularized low-rank representation (LRR) destriping algorithm is proposed by incorporating the LRR technique. To obtain desired destriping performance, two sides of performing destriping are included: 1) To exploit the high spectral correlation between the observation subimages in distinct bands, the technique of LRR is first utilized for destriping, and 2) to preserve the intrinsic local structure of the original hyperspectral data, the graph regularizer is incorporated in the objective function. The experimental results and quantitative analysis demonstrate that the proposed method can both remove striping noise and achieve cleaner and higher contrast reconstructed results.

A MAP-Based Algorithm for Destriping and Inpainting of Remotely Sensed Images

Remotely sensed images often suffer from the common problems of stripe noise and random dead pixels. The techniques to recover a good image from the contaminated one are called image destriping (for stripes) and image inpainting (for dead pixels). This paper presents a maximum a posteriori (MAP)-based algorithm for both destriping and inpainting problems. The main advantage of this algorithm is that it can constrain the solution space according to a priori knowledge during the destriping and inpainting processes. In the MAP framework, the likelihood probability density function (PDF) is constructed based on a linear image observation model, and a robust Huber-Markov model is used as the prior PDF. The gradient descent optimization method is employed to produce the desired image. The proposed algorithm has been tested using moderate resolution imaging spectrometer images for destriping and China-Brazil Earth Resource Satellite and QuickBird images for simulated inpainting. The experiment results and quantitative analyses verify the efficacy of this algorithm.

Striping Noise Detection and Correction of Remote Sensing Images

This paper presents an image destriping system for correcting striping noise of remote-sensing images. The developed system identifies stripe positions based on edge-detection and line-tracing algorithms. Pixels not affected by striping are used as control points to construct cubic spline functions describing spatial gray level distributions of an image. Detected stripes are corrected by replacing the pixels with more reasonable gray values computed from constructed spline functions. Gray values of clean pixels not affected by stripes are not altered to preserve data genuineness. Several experimental results demonstrate that the developed system can correctly detect stripes in remote-sensing images and effectively repair them. Evaluations of the results based on an quantitative image quality index indicate that the image quality has been improved significantly after destriping. The destriped images are not only visually more plausible but also can provide better interpretability and are more suitable for computerized analysis.

Destriping multisensor imagery with moment matching

Image destriping is necessary due to sensor-to-sensor variation within instruments. This has most often been done by assuming that each sensor views a statistically similar subimage, and a histogram of each sensor's response is made to match the overall histogram. Histogram matching shows sensitivity to violations of the similarity assumption. An alternative algorithm is suggested which matches the gain and offset of each sensor to typical values, and which is resistant to the effects of outliers. Tests on a sample image show the moment matching algorithm reduces the variance between sensors to a greater degree than histogram matching.