SAR Image Despeckling Using a Convolutional Neural Network

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images are often contaminated by a multiplicative noise known as speckle. Speckle makes the processing and interpretation of SAR images difficult. We propose a deep learning-based approach called, Image Despeckling Convolutional Neural Network (ID-CNN), for automatically removing speckle from the input noisy images. In particular, ID-CNN uses a set of convolutional layers along with batch normalization and rectified linear unit (ReLU) activation function and a component-wise division residual layer to estimate speckle and it is trained in an end-to-end fashion using a combination of Euclidean loss and Total Variation (TV) loss. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real SAR images show that the proposed method achieves significant improvements over the state-of-the-art speckle reduction methods.