Optical-Driven Nonlocal SAR Despeckling
Luisa Verdoliva, Raffaele Gaetano, Giuseppe Ruello, Giovanni Poggi · IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters · 2014
We propose a new synthetic aperture radar (SAR) despeckling technique based on nonlocal filtering and driven by a coregistered optical image. A preliminary homogeneous versus heterogeneous classification of the image is used to decide where the optical guide can be safely used, thus preventing any distortion of the SAR geometry. Even in regions where the use of optical data is enabled, despeckling is carried out exclusively in the SAR domain, and the optical guide is used only to improve the predictor selection in nonlocal filtering and, hence, in the estimation process. Experiments on real-world imagery confirm the potential of the proposed approach.