PAN-DeSpeck:A Lightweight Pyramid and Attention-Based Network for SAR Image Despeckling

SAR images commonly suffer fromspeckle noise,posing a significant challenge in their analysis and interpretation.Existing convolutional neural network(CNN)based despeckling methods have shown great performance in removing speckle noise.However,these CNN-basedmethods have a fewlimitations.They do not decouple complex background information in amulti-resolutionmanner.Moreover,they have deep network structures thatmay result in many parameters,limiting their applicability tomobile devices.Furthermore,extracting key speckle information in the presence of complex background is also a major problem with SAR.The proposed study addresses these limitations by introducing a lightweight pyramid and attention-based despeckling(PAN-Despeck)network.The primary objective is to enhance image quality and enable improved information interpretation,particularly on mobile devices and scenarios involving complex backgrounds.The PAN-Despeck network leverages domainspecific knowledge and integrates Gaussian Laplacian image pyramid decomposition for multi-resolution image analysis.By utilizing this approach,complex background information can be effectively decoupled,leading to enhanced despeckling performance.Furthermore,the attention mechanism selectively focuses on key speckle features and facilitates complex background removal.The network incorporates recursive and residual blocks to ensure computational efficiency and accelerate training speed,making it lightweight while maintaining high performance.Through comprehensive evaluations,it is demonstrated that PAN-Despeck outperforms existing image restoration methods.With an impressive average peak signal-to-noise ratio(PSNR)of 28.355114 and a remarkable structural similarity index(SSIM)of 0.905467,it demonstrates exceptional performance in effectively reducing speckle noise in SAR images.The source code for the PAN-DeSpeck network is available on GitHub.

Object Detection Research of SAR Image Using Improved Faster Region-Based Convolutional Neural Network

Target detection technology of synthetic aperture radar(SAR)imageis widely used in the field of military reconnaissance and surveillance.The traditional SAR image target detection methods need to be provided a lot of empirical knowledge because the characteristics of SAR images in different configurations(attitude,pitch angle,imaging parameters,etc.)will change greatly,resulting in high generalization error.Currently,deep learning method has achieved great success in the field of image processing.Research shows that deep learning can achieve a more intrinsic description of the data,while the model has a stronger ability of modeling and generalization.In order to solve the problem of insufficient data in SAR data sets,an experimental system for acquiring SAR image data in real scenes was built.Then the transfer learning method and the improved convolution neural network algorithm(PCA+Faster R-CNN)are applied to improve the target detection precision.Finally,experimental results demonstrate the significant effectiveness of the proposed method.

A Novel SAR Image Ship Small Targets Detection Method

To satisfy practical requirements of high real-time accuracy and low computational complexity of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image ship small target detection, this paper proposes a small ship target detection method based on the improved You Only Look Once Version 3 (YOLOv3). The main contributions of this study are threefold. First, the feature extraction network of the original YOLOV3 algorithm is replaced with the VGG16 network convolution layer. Second, general convolution is transformed into depthwise separable convolution, thereby reducing the computational cost of the algorithm. Third, a residual network structure is introduced into the feature extraction network to reuse the shallow target feature information, which enhances the detailed features of the target and ensures the improvement in accuracy of small target detection performance. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, many experiments are conducted on public SAR image datasets. For ship targets with complex backgrounds and small ship targets in the SAR image, the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is verified. Results show that the accuracy and recall rate improved by 5.31% and 2.77%, respectively, compared with the original YOLOV3. Furthermore, the proposed model not only significantly reduces the computational effort, but also improves the detection accuracy of ship small target.

De-Speckling of SAR Images with Fuzzy Filters along with Altered Preserved Edge Values

In this research, the denoising of speckled SAR image has been done with fuzzy filters (ATMED, TMED, ATMAV & TMAV). SAR image or Synthetic Aperture Radar image consists of the informatics of ISW (Internal solitary waves). A new technique has been proposed which preserved the edge pixels by fuzzy edge detection method and then altered with the filtered image-pixels by fuzzy filtration for getting the denoised image. The comparative result shows that the proposed filter performs better than the other filtered results in terms of PSNR (41.61 dB), MAE (1.47), MSE (4.54) for TMAVxAPE & SSIM (81%) for ATMEDwAPE. The proposed method in this research shows better SSI (Spackle Suppression Index) value. Therefore the experimental result illustrates that the suggested fuzzy filter is much more capable of simultaneously protecting edges and suppressing speckle noise. This research will be beneficial to remove spackle noise from SAR images and can be used for remote sensing and mapping of surface area of earth.

Edge Detection of River in SAR Image Based on Contourlet Modulus Maxima and Improved Mathematical Morphology

To cope with the problems that edge detection operators are liable to make the detected edges too blurry for synthetic aperture radar(SAR)images,an edge detection method for detecting river in SAR images is proposed based on contourlet modulus maxima and improved mathematical morphology.The SAR image is firstly transformed to a contourlet domain.According to the directional information and gradient information of directional subband of contourlet transform,the modulus maximum and the improved mathematical morphology are used to detect high frequency and low frequency sub-image edges,respectively.Subsequently,the edges of river in SAR image are obtained after fusing the high frequency sub-image and the low frequency sub-image.Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed edge detection method can obtain more accurate edge location and reduce false edges,compared with the Canny method,the method based on wavelet and Canny,the method based on contourlet modulus maxima,and the method based on improved(ROEWA).The obtained river edges are complete and clear.

Three-dimensional positions of scattering centers reconstruction from multiple SAR images based on radargrammetry

A method and procedure is presented to reconstruct three-dimensional(3D) positions of scattering centers from multiple synthetic aperture radar(SAR) images. Firstly, two-dimensional(2D) attribute scattering centers of targets are extracted from 2D SAR images. Secondly, similarity measure is developed based on 2D attributed scatter centers' location, type, and radargrammetry principle between multiple SAR images. By this similarity, we can associate 2D scatter centers and then obtain candidate 3D scattering centers. Thirdly, these candidate scattering centers are clustered in 3D space to reconstruct final 3D positions. Compared with presented methods, the proposed method has a capability of describing distributed scattering center, reduces false and missing 3D scattering centers, and has fewer restrictionson modeling data. Finally, results of experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method.

SAR image de-noising via grouping-based PCA and guided filter

A novel synthetic aperture radar(SAR)image de-noising method based on the local pixel grouping(LPG)principal component analysis(PCA)and guided filter is proposed.This method contains two steps.In the first step,we process the noisy image by coarse filters,which can suppress the speckle effectively.The original SAR image is transformed into the additive noise model by logarithmic transform with deviation correction.Then,we use the pixel and its nearest neighbors as a vector to select training samples from the local window by LPG based on the block similar matching.The LPG method ensures that only the similar sample patches are used in the local statistical calculation of PCA transform estimation,so that the local features of the image can be well preserved after coefficients shrinkage in the PCA domain.In the second step,we do the guided filtering which can effectively eliminate small artifacts left over from the coarse filtering.Experimental results of simulated and real SAR images show that the proposed method outstrips the state-of-the-art image de-noising methods in the peak signalto-noise ratio(PSNR),the structural similarity(SSIM)index and the equivalent number of looks(ENLs),and is of perceived image quality.

NEW SAR IMAGE INTERPRETATION METHOD OF AIRCRAFT BASED ON JOINT TIME-FREQUENCY ANALYSIS

With the continuous improvement of Synthetic Aperture Radar(SAR) resolution, interpreting the small targets like aircraft in SAR images becomes possible and turn out to be a hot spot in SAR application research. However, due to the complexity of SAR imaging mechanism, interpreting targets in SAR images is a tough problem. This paper presents a new aircraft interpretation method based on the joint time-frequency analysis and multi-dimensional contrasting of basic structures. Moreover, SAR data acquisition experiment is designed for interpreting the aircraft. Analyzing the experiment data with our method, the result shows that the proposed method largely makes use of the SAR data information. The reasonable results can provide some auxiliary support for the SAR images manual interpretation.

SAR image despeckling via Lp norm regularization

Synthetic aperture radar(SAR) image despeckling has been an attractive problem in remote sensing.The main challenge is to suppress speckle while preserving edges and preventing unnatural artifacts(such as annoying artifacts in homogeneous regions and over-smoothed edges).To address these problems,this paper proposes a new variational model with a nonconvex nonsmooth Lp(0 <p<1) norm regularization.It incorporates Lp(0<p<1) norm regularization and I-divergence fidelity term.Due to the nonconvex nonsmooth property,the regularization can better recover neat edges and homogeneous regions.The Ⅰ-divergence fidelity term is used to suppress the multiplicative noise effectively.Moreover,based on variable-splitting and alternating direction method of multipliers(ADMM) method,an efficient algorithm is proposed for solving this model.Intensive experimental results demonstrate that nonconvex nonsmooth model is superior to other state-of-the-art approaches qualitatively and quantitatively.

OGSRN:Optical-guided super-resolution network for SAR image

Although Convolutional Neural Networks(CNNs)have significantly improved the development of image Super-Resolution(SR)technology in recent years,the existing SR methods for SAR image with large scale factors have rarely been studied due to technical difficulty.A more efficient method is to obtain comprehensive information to guide the SAR image reconstruction.Indeed,the co-registered High-Resolution(HR)optical image has been successfully applied to enhance the quality of SAR image due to its discriminative characteristics.Inspired by this,we propose a novel Optical-Guided Super-Resolution Network(OGSRN)for SAR image with large scale factors.Specifically,our proposed OGSRN consists of two sub-nets:a SAR image SuperResolution U-Net(SRUN)and a SAR-to-Optical Residual Translation Network(SORTN).The whole process during training includes two stages.In stage-1,the SR SAR images are reconstructed by the SRUN.And an Enhanced Residual Attention Module(ERAM),which is comprised of the Channel Attention(CA)and Spatial Attention(SA)mechanisms,is constructed to boost the representation ability of the network.In stage-2,the output of the stage-1 and its corresponding HR SAR images are translated to optical images by the SORTN,respectively.And then the differences between SR images and HR images are computed in the optical space to obtain feedback information that can reduce the space of possible SR solution.After that,we can use the optimized SRUN to directly produce HR SAR image from Low-Resolution(LR)SAR image in the testing phase.The experimental results show that under the guidance of optical image,our OGSRN can achieve excellent performance in both quantitative assessment metrics and visual quality.

Fusion of SAR and Optical Image for Sea Ice Extraction

It is difficult to balance local details and global distribution using a single source image in marine target detection of a large scene.To solve this problem,a technique based on the fusion of optical image and synthetic aperture radar(SAR)image for the extraction of sea ice is proposed in this paper.The Band 2(B2 image of Sentinel-2(S2 in the research area is selected as optical image data.Preprocessing on the optical image,such as resampling,projection transformation and format conversion,are conducted to the S2 dataset before fusion.Imaging characteristics of the sea ice have been analyzed,and a new deep learning(DL)model,OceanTDL5,is built to detect sea ices.The fusion of the Sentinel-1(S1 and S2 images is realized by solving the optimal pixel values based on deriving Poisson Equation.The experimental results indicate that the use of a fused image improves the accuracy of sea ice detection compared with the use of a single data source.The fused image has richer spatial details and a clearer texture compared with the original optical image,and its material sense and color are more abundant.

USING COVARIANCE INTERSECTION FOR CHANGE DETECTION IN REMOTE SENSING IMAGES

In this paper,an unsupervised change detection technique for remote sensing images acquired on the same geographical area but at different time instances is proposed by conducting Covariance Intersection(CI) to perform unsupervised fusion of the final fuzzy partition matrices from the Fuzzy C-Means(FCM) clustering for the feature space by applying compressed sampling to the given remote sensing images.The proposed approach exploits a CI-based data fusion of the membership function matrices,which are obtained by taking the Fuzzy C-Means(FCM) clustering of the frequency-domain feature vectors and spatial-domain feature vectors,aimed at enhancing the unsupervised change detection performance.Compressed sampling is performed to realize the image local feature sampling,which is a signal acquisition framework based on the revelation that a small collection of linear projections of a sparse signal contains enough information for stable recovery.The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm has a good change detection results and also performs quite well on denoising purpose.

New slant range model and azimuth perturbation resampling based high-squint maneuvering platform SAR imaging

Strong spatial variance of the imaging parameters and serious geometric distortion of the image are induced by the acceleration and vertical velocity in a high-squint synthetic aperture radar(SAR)mounted on maneuvering platforms.In this paper,a frequency-domain imaging algorithm is proposed based on a novel slant range model and azimuth perturbation resampling.First,a novel slant range model is presented for mitigating the geometric distortion according to the equal squint angle curve on the ground surface.Second,the correction of azimuth-dependent range cell migration(RCM)is achieved by introducing a high-order time-domain perturbation function.Third,an azimuth perturbation resampling method is proposed for azimuth compression.The azimuth resampling and the time-domain perturbation are used for correcting first-order and high-order azimuthal spatial-variant components,respectively.Experimental results illustrate that the proposed algorithm can improve the focusing quality and the geometric distortion correction accuracy of the imaging scene effectively.

Investigating the seasonal dynamics of surface water over the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau using Sentinel-1 imagery and a novel gated multiscale ConvNet

The surface water in the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau(QTP)region has undergone dramatic changes in recent decades.To capture dynamic surface water information,many satellite imagery-based methods have been proposed.However,these methods are still limited in terms of automation and accuracy and thus prevent surface water dynamic studies in large-scale QTP regions.In this study,we developed a new fully automatic method for accurate surface water mapping by using Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar(SAR)imagery and convolutional networks(ConvNets).Specifically,we built a new multiscale ConvNet structure to improve the model capability in surface water body extraction.Moreover,a gating mechanism is introduced to promote the efficient use of multiscale information.According to the accuracy assessment,the proposed gated multiscale ConvNet(GMNet)achieved the highest overall accuracy of 98.07%.We applied our GMNet for monthly surface water mapping on the QTP;accordingly,we found that the QTP region experienced significant surface waterfluctuations over one year.The surface water also showed distinct spatial heterogeneity on the QTP;that is,the surface water fraction of the Inner Tibetan Basin was significantly higher than that of the Mekong Basin in both the wet and dry seasons.

Design of synthetic aperture radar low-intercept radio frequency stealth

Not confined to a certain point,such as waveform,this paper systematically studies the low-intercept radio frequency(RF)stealth design of synthetic aperture radar(SAR)from the system level.The study is carried out from two levels.In the first level,the maximum low-intercept range equation of the conventional SAR system is deduced firstly,and then the maximum low-intercept range equation of the multiple-input multiple-output SAR system is deduced.In the second level,the waveform design and imaging method of the low-intercept RF SAR system are given and verified by simulation.Finally,the main technical characteristics of the lowintercept RF stealth SAR system are given to guide the design of low-intercept RF stealth SAR system.

Control and utilization of range-dependent beampattern with waveform diverse array radars

The transmit antenna beampattern of the phased array radar is only a function of angle,limiting its ability to discriminate the targets from the same direction.Recently,the waveform diverse array radars expand the angle-dependent beampattern to an angle-time-range-dependent three-dimensional function by modulating the frequencies/time delays/phases across different transmit antenna elements.In this respect,extra Degrees-of-Freedom(DOFs)in the range domain are achieved,which opens up an innovative way to fulfil the tasks with enhanced system performance by jointly using the angle and range information.This paper summaries the developments of waveform diverse radars,including the Frequency Diverse Array(FDA),the Space-Time-CirculatingArray(STCA),and the Element-Pulse-Coding(EPC)frameworks,with emphasis on the analysis of the range-dependent beampattern from the basic properties upon how it is controlled.Moreover,the most recent advances of utilizing such a range-dependent beampattern in target detection,parameter estimation and identifiability,clutter suppression,jammer suppression and Synthetic Aperture Radar(SAR)imaging are discussed.