SAR Image Despeckling Via Sparse Representation

SAR image despeckling is an active research area in image processing due to its importance in improving the quality of image for object detection and classification. In this paper, a new approach is proposed for multiplicative noise in SAR image removal based on nonlocal sparse representation by dictionary learning and collaborative filtering. First, a image is divided into many patches, and then a cluster is formed by clustering log-similar image patches using Fuzzy C-means (FCM). For each cluster, an over-complete dictionary is computed using the K-SVD method that iteratively updates the dictionary and the sparse coefficients. The patches belonging to the same cluster are then reconstructed by a sparse combination of the corresponding dictionary atoms. The reconstructed patches are finally collaboratively aggregated to build the denoised image. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves much better results than many state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of both objective evaluation index (PSNR and ENL) and subjective visual perception.