SAR Image Despeckling by Sparse Reconstruction Based on Shearlets

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image is usually polluted by multiplicative speckle noise, which can affect further processing of SAR image. This paper presents a new approach for multiplicative noise removal in SAR images based on sparse coding by shearlets filtering. First, a SAR despeckling model is built by the theory of compressed sensing (CS). Secondly, obtain shearlets coefficient through shearlet transform, each scale coefficient is represented as a unit. For each unit, sparse coefficient is iteratively estimated by using Bayesian estimation based on shearlets domain. The represented units are finally collaboratively aggregated to construct the despeckling image. Our results in SAR image despeckling show the good performance of this algorithm, and prove that the algorithm proposed is robustness to noise, which is not only good for reducing speckle, but also has an advantage in holding information of the edge.