A Downsampled SAR-BM3D Despeckling Approach for Single-Look SAR Images in High Resolution

SAR-BM3D is one of the state of the art despeckling algorithms for SAR images. However, when tackling with high resolution SAR images, it often has an unsatisfying despeckling performance in the homogeneous smooth regions, together with a high time complexity. In this paper, a novel downsampled SAR-BM3D despeckling approach combined with edge compensation is proposed. The proposed algorithm consists of two steps. First, despeckle the image which is a downsampled version of original image with SAR-BM3D. Then, compensate edges in each level when upsampling. This approach not only utilizes the good ability of feature preservation, but also improves performance of smoothing homogenous regions. When it comes to high resolution SAR images, the efficiency can be raised by six to seven times, compared to original SAR-BM3D. Experiments on simulated and real SAR images show that the proposed method reaches a high level in terms of visual quality and act more efficiently.