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An Affinity-Based Algorithm in Nonsubsampled Contourlet Transform Domain: Application to Synthetic Aperture Radar Image Denoising

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Abstract

An algorithm in which affinity is merged into nonsubsampled contourlet transform (NSCT) to denoise synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image is proposed. The important information (boundaries or details) or non-important information (homogeneous area) in a SAR image is estimated based on affinity matrix, by which the affinity-based denoising assigns a high affinity element to the coefficients of NSCT that belong to same region. The foreground and background in NSCT domain are automatically initialized which avoids the need for user initialization. Foreground probability obtained by optimizing objective function can be used to achieve the posterior ratio. Combining the posterior ratio and prior ratio, we can obtain the shrunk coefficients. The proposed algorithm was applied to real SAR images denoising and compared through the SAR image vision effect, the equivalent number of looks (ENL) and the edge sustain index (ESI). Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the compared algorithms and achieves the better denoising result and edge preservation.

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Acknowledgments

This work is supported by the Project Supported by Natural Science Basic Research Plan in Shaanxi Province of China (Program No.2014JM8301); The Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities. The National Basic Research Program of China (No. 2013CB329402).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Intelligent Perception and Image Understanding of Ministry of Education, International Research Center for Intelligent Perception and Computation, Xidian University, Xi’an, Peoples Republic of China

    Xiaolin Tian, Licheng Jiao & Kaiwu Guo

  2. Institute of Intelligent Information Processing, Xidian University, Xi’an, 710071, China

    Xiaolin Tian

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  1. Xiaolin Tian
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  2. Licheng Jiao
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  3. Kaiwu Guo
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Correspondence to Xiaolin Tian.

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Tian, X., Jiao, L. & Guo, K. An Affinity-Based Algorithm in Nonsubsampled Contourlet Transform Domain: Application to Synthetic Aperture Radar Image Denoising. J Sign Process Syst 83, 373–388 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11265-015-1024-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11265-015-1024-2

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