SAR Image Super-Resolution Based on Noise-Free Generative Adversarial Network

Deep learning has been successfully applied to the ordinary image super-resolution (SR). However, since the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images are often disturbed by multiplicative noise known as speckle and more blurry than ordinary images, there are few deep learning methods for the SAR image SR. In this paper, a deep generative adversarial network (DGAN) is proposed to reconstruct the pseudo high-resolution (HR) SAR images. First, a generator network is constructed to remove the noise of low-resolution SAR image and generate HR SAR image. Second, a discriminator network is used to differentiate between the pseudo super-resolution images and the realistic HR images. The adversarial objective function is introduced to make the pseudo HR SAR images closer to real SAR images. The experimental results show that our method can maintain the SAR image content with high-level noise suppression. The performance evaluation based on peak signal-to-noise-ratio and structural similarity index shows the superiority of the proposed method to the conventional CNN baselines.