Multi-scale MAP despeckling of sonar images

Abstract

The sonar images are perturbed by a multiplicative noise called speckle, due to the coherent nature of the scattering phenomenon. The use of speckle reduction filters is necessary to optimize the images exploitation procedures. This paper presents a new speckle reduction method in the wavelets domain using a novel Bayesian-based algorithm, which tends to reduce the speckle, preserving the structural features (like the discontinuities) and textural information of the scene. A blind speckle-suppression method that performs a nonlinear operation on the data, based on a new bishrink filter variant is obtained. Finally, some simulation examples prove the performances of the proposed denoising method. These performances are compared with the results obtained applying state-of-the-art speckle reduction techniques.