SAR speckle reduction using Laplace mixture model and spatial mutual information in the directionlet domain

The reduction of multiplicative speckle noise which always complicates the human and automatic interpretation of objects is very significant for the practical applications of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image. In this paper, a new maximum a posteriori (MAP) despeckling method based on directionlet transform is proposed. To convert the multiplicative noise into an additive one, the logarithmic transform is first applied to the SAR images. Then, the directionlet coefficients of the noise-free (or underlying backscatter) image and of the speckle noise are modeled as Laplace mixture distribution with zero-mean and Gaussian distribution, respectively. Within Bayesian framework, a MAP estimator is constructed using these assumed prior distributions. After obtaining the parameter estimates using expectation-maximization algorithm, the noise-free coefficients are estimated by a non-linear shrinkage function based on the average version of Bayesian estimator. To improve the denoising performance, we combine the intra-scale dependency in terms of mutual information with the MAP estimator to refine the estimated results. Finally, we compare the proposed algorithm with several other speckle filters applied on synthetic and actual SAR images. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms other filters in terms of signal-to-noise ratio, edge preservation and equivalent number of looks measures in most cases.