Despeckling for side-scan sonar images based on adaptive block-matching and 3D filtering

Side-scan sonar (SSS) is an electronic device that utilizes the propagation characteristics of sound waves under water to complete underwater detection. Because the SSS produces images and maps according to the intensity of acoustic echo, speckle noise will be inevitably involved. A speckle denoising method based on block-matching and 3D filtering (BM3D) is proposed to filter the multiplicative speckle noise in SSS images. First, the SSS image is transformed by power and logarithm. The wavelet transform is used to estimate the general noisy level of the polluted image. Second, the parameters of the BM3D algorithm are updated according to the noise estimation results of each local patch. At last, after comparing the general noise estimation and the local noise estimation, the proposed algorithm chooses the best estimation to filter every patch separately to solve the problem that the noise is not evenly distributed. The experimental results show that the improved BM3D algorithm can effectively reduce the speckle noise in SSS images and obtain good visual effects. The Equivalent Number of Looks of the proposed algorithm is at least 6.83% higher, the Speckle Suppression Index is lower than traditional algorithm, and the Speckle Suppression and Mean Preservation Index is reduced by at least 3.30%. This method is mainly used for sonar image noise reduction, and has certain practical values for ultrasonic, radar or OCT images polluted by speckle noise.