Performance Evaluation of Speckle Noise Reduction in SAR Image using DSF Filter

IJSTE - International Journal of Science Technology & Engineering | Volume 3 | Issue 07 | January 2017 ISSN (online): 2349-784X

Performance Evaluation of Speckle Noise Reduction in SAR Image using DSF Filter Anshita Shrivastava ME Scholar Chhatrapati Shivaji Institute of Technology, Durg India

Kranti Jain Assistant Professor Chhatrapati Shivaji Institute of Technology, Durg India

Prashant Richarya Associate Professor Chhatrapati Shivaji Institute of Technology, Durg India

Abstract Speckle Noise filters tries to restore the reflectivity of radar assuming that multiplicative speckle noise id present in the image.

Some of the best known filters, namely the Lee filter, Kuan filters or Frost, are adaptive filters which are based on the local statistics that is computed within a fixed size square window. Therefore, the speckle is reduced as a function of heterogeneity that is measured by the local coefficient of variation. As the radar reflectivity suffer significant variations due to the occurrence of strong scatters or the structural features (lines or edge) in processing windows, this type of speckle filtering is not so effective.

This paper presents an algorithm for the filtering using Directional Smoothing Filter. SAR images can be used in a myriad of earth observation applications covering areas in global monitoring, mapping, charting, and land use planning. There is also the area of natural resource management, including forestry agriculture, water quality monitoring and wildlife habitat management.

With such a diverse set of applications a wide variety of system requirements: the challenge of including SAR image compression in a system is to preserve sufficient information content of the imagery, while providing better noise removal from the SAR image. Thus by removing noise and by preserving the information the proposed method allow high data transmission rates and archival ratios.

Keywords: Directional Smoothing Filter (DSF), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Electromagnetic (EM), Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), Shuttle Imaging Radar (SIR) ________________________________________________________________________________________________________ I.

INTRODUCTION

A radar system illuminates an area with microwave pulses and records the strength and travel-time of the returned signals. This allows the distance (or range) of the reflecting objects to be determined. As in an optical instrument the resolution of such a system is affected by the size of the aperture: a larger aperture gives a finer resolution. However, the aperture size cm not be increased beyond some practical limits. Therefore, it should search for other solutions in order to generate high resolution images. Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is a coherent system in that it retains both the phase and magnitude of the backscattered echo signal. It can be attached to a moving platform, either a satellite or an aircraft. As the radar moves, pulses are transmitted at a fixed repetition rate. The return echoes pass through the receiver and are recorded in an 'echo store'. Because the radar is moving relative to the ground, the returned echoes are Doppler shifted (negatively as the radar approaches a target; positively as it moves away). Comparing the Doppler-shifted frequencies to a reference frequency allows many returned signals to be "focused" on a single point, effectively increasing the length of the antenna that is imaging that particular point.

Vision is the most advanced of human senses, so it is not surprising that images play the single most important role in our perception. However, unlike humans, who are limited to the visual band of the electromagnetic (EM) spectrum, imaging machines cover almost the entire EM spectrum, ranging from gamma to radio waves. They can operate on images generated by sources that human are not accustomed to associating with images. These include ultrasound, electron microscopy and computergenerated images. Thus digital image processing encompasses a wide and varied field of applications. There is no general agreement among the authors regarding where image processing ends stops and other related areas, such as image analysis and computer vision start. Sometimes a distinction is made by defining image processing as a discipline in which both the input and output of a process are images. We believe this to be a liming and somewhat artificial boundary. For example, under this definition, even the trivial task of computing the average intensity of an image would not be considered as image processing operation. On the other hand, there are fields such as computer vision whose ultimate goal is to use computers to emulate human vision, including learning and being able to make inferences and take action based on visual inputs. This area itself is a branch of artificial intelligence (AI) whose objective is to emulate human intelligence. The field of AI is in its earliest stage of infancy in terms of development, with progress having been much slower than originally anticipated. The area of image analysis is in between image processing and computer vision.

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Performance Evaluation of Speckle Noise Reduction in SAR Image using DSF Filter (IJSTE/ Volume 3 / Issue 07 / 006)

Fig. 1: SAR Image Formation

There are no clear-cut boundaries in the continuum from image processing at one end to computer vision at the other.

However, on useful paradigm is to consider three types of computerized processes in this continuum: low-, mid- and high-level processes. Low-level processes involve primitive operations such as image pre-processing to reduce noise, contrast enhancement and image sharpening. Image compression is important for the storage and transmission of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images. The success of the operating SAR systems such as the Sea sat-A SARI the Shuttle Imaging Radar (SIR-A and SIRB)missions, together with the recent launch of the Canadian Radars at satellite and numerous airborne SAR systems, has stimulated considerable interests in both airborne and space borne SAR as a remote sensing tool. However the large amount of data collection planned for current and future SAR missions poses a severe problem for existing data handling, archiving, and distribution systems. Thus, there is a necessity of SAR image compression for effective storage and transmission of these images. To alleviate the conflict between the increasing demands of SAR data transmission and a need for viable high rate data transmission channels, many techniques have been proposed to meet the anticipated data flow requirements. Compression of image data could reduce the data volume and significantly decrease both the transmission and archive costs.

SAR images can be used in a myriad of earth observation applications covering areas in global monitoring, mapping, charting, and land use planning. There is also the area of natural resource management, including forestry agriculture, water quality monitoring and wildlife habitat management. With such a diverse set of applications a wide variety of system requirements: the challenge of including SAR image compression in a system is to preserve sufficient information content of the imagery, while providing compression ratios large enough to allow high data transmission rates and archival ratios. Speckle reduction is usually required before many other image analysis operations; many speckle filters have been designed which can be used; there are many successful image compression algorithms available for optical or noise-free images. Speckle noise reduction is usually performed in the spatial domain. The frequently-used multiplicative speckle mode1 is assumed. After a logarithmic operation, speckle noise is converted into additive noise which remains uncorrelated in the wavelet domain.

Image denoising is one of the prime areas of digital image processing. It is the process of removal or reduction of degradations that are incurred while the image is being obtained [2]. Degradation comes from blurring as well as noise due to electronic and photometric sources. Blurring is a form of bandwidth reduction of the image caused by the imperfect image formation process such as relative motion between the camera and the original scene or by an optical system that is out of focus. When aerial photographs are produced for remote sensing purposes, blurs are introduced by atmospheric turbulence, aberrations in the optical system and relative motion between camera and ground. In addition to these blurring effects, the recorded image is corrupted by noises too. A noise is introduced in the transmission medium due to a noisy channel, errors during the measurement process and during quantization of the data for digital storage. Each element in the imaging chain such as lenses, film, digitizer etc. contributes to the degradation. Presence of noise is very common issue in digital images. A wide variety of noise models are associated with digital images. An important subset of noise is the Impulse noise. It is a special type of noise which can have many different origins. Images are often corrupted by impulse noise caused by malfunctioning of cameras sensor cells, transmission errors, faulty memory locations or timing errors in analog-to-digital conversion. Salt and pepper noise is a type of impulse noise which can corrupt the image, where the noisy pixels can take only the minimum and the maximum values in the dynamic range. In an 8 bit gray scale image the minimum and the maximum pixel values are 0 and 255 respectively. Efficient suppression of noise in an image is a very important issue. De-noising finds extensive applications in many fields of image processing. Image De-noising is an important pre-processing task before further feature extraction, texture analysis etc.

The purpose of De-noising is to remove the noise while retaining the edges and other detailed features as much as possible.

Conventional techniques of image de-noising using linear and nonlinear techniques have already been studied and analyzed for efficient de-noising scheme. In the present work efforts are made to design a filter which processing of image like segmentation.

The proposed work concentrates on the issues of de-noising the digital images corrupted with high density speckle using an improved median filter. The aim of the undertaken work in this thesis includes.

1) Study of various noise models associated with digital images and the filtering techniques used to restore the corrupted images.

2) Implementation of Directional smoothing filter for removal of multiplicative noise in SAR images.

3) Applying the proposed algorithm on corrupted images and evaluate its performance using parameters like Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), Image Enhancement Factor (IEF), Mean Squared Error (MSE) and Execution Time.

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Performance Evaluation of Speckle Noise Reduction in SAR Image using DSF Filter (IJSTE/ Volume 3 / Issue 07 / 006)

4) Comparison of the proposed method with the existing image filtering techniques, including the recently proposed Directional smooth Filter (DSF) II. PROBLEM AND SOLUTIONS In order to attain good noiseless output images for SAR images, SAR image data characteristics must be taken into account. This dissertation will address the effects of two key characteristics of SAR images, namely their speckle noise and their wide dynamic range. Speckle noise contamination of SAR images is an important data characteristic that needs to be considered in SAR image compression. Speckle is an inherent phenomenon in coherent imaging systems. Speckle noise not only obscures image scene contents. But it reduces image’s visual performance by weakening or breaking the inter-pixel correlation. Consequently, in order to compress SAR images more efficiently. It is desirable to reduce speckle noise improve for better image. Another consideration in designing SAR image denoising algorithms is that SAR images are usually of large size; as such these different regions may exhibit a variety of information content which are of differing levels of interest for different users.

III. PROPOSED METHOD If the image information interferes with impulsive noise [16], filters based on the robust order-statistic theory provide an efficient solution. Note that the direct extension of the order-statistic theory to colour images is impossible due to their vectorial nature [18]. Therefore, the observed samples are ordered according to specially developed distance functions. Reducing speckle noise is an important content for SAR image interpretations. There are many methods to smooth speckle noise, such as multilook processing technique and filtering processing algorithms. Multilook processing decreases image spatial resolution at the cost of increasing radiation resolution. Mean and median filters can preferably restrain speckle noise. But both of the mare non-adaptive filters [15] and speckle noise is multiplicative [16], so the saving textures are not satisfactory. Then a lot of locally adaptive statistics filters based on multiplicative speckle noise were developed.

A filter that can be used to match elliptically-shaped regions that are aligned with the co-ordinate axes is given by: f ( x, y)

=

1 if

x a

2 2



y b

2 2

and

1

0

otherwise

(1)

Where ‘a’ and ‘b’ are the axes lengths. The values of ‘a’ and ‘b’ define the scale of the filter and their ratio defines the aspect ratio or the elongatedness of the ellipses. To match elongated regions at an arbitrary orientation θ with the x-axis, it can use the matrix of rotation to transform each of the points inside the ellipse. These yields: f ( x, y)

=

1 if

( x sin   y cos  ) a

2

2 

( x sin   y cos  ) b

2

2

 1 and

0 otherwise.

(2)

It is easy enough to see that the filter described in Equation (1) cannot be written in the form f 1(x) and f2(y) and is therefore not separable. Consequently, the filtering cannot be divided into two stages of row-wise filtering and column wise filtering. Any oriented smoothing filter, f, is such that f(x,y)≠f(-x,y), f(x,y)≠f(x,-y), f(x,y)=f(-x,-y) (3) The two inequalities are a result of the meaning of “oriented”, since the orientation we mean is with respect to the coordinate axes. The symmetry constraint is imposed by the low-pass nature of the filters. Suppose a low-pass filter, f(x, y)exists that is both oriented and separable. Then, we can write: f(x, y)=g1 (x) × g 2 (y) This, along with the inequalities of Equation (3) yields: g1 (x) × g 2 (y) ≠ g1 (x) × g 2 (−y) (4) g1 (x) × g 2 (y) ≠ g1 (−x) × g 2 (y) (5) For any value of (x, y) where f(x, y) ≠0 (so that neither g1 (x) nor g 2 (y) is zero) So this yields, g1 (x) ≠ g1 (−x)g 2 (y) ≠ g 2 (−y) (6) This implies that within the region of support of the filter functions h1 (x) and h2 (y) can be defined such that: g1 (x) = h1 (x) × g1 (−x) g 2 (y) = h2 (y) × g 2 (−y) (7) This, along with the symmetry constraint of Equation (2) yields h1 (x) = h2 (y)-1 which would lead us to the absurd conclusion that the filter values in the x and y directions are dependent, unless the functions h1 (x) and h2 (y) are constant. Hence, there exists no low-pass filter, f(x, y), that is both oriented and separable.

Flow Chart As shown in the flow chart below the input siganl is taken first and then it is converted to the gray scale image as to apply filtering the input argument to the function needs the image to be in gray scale format. Then speckle noise is added to the image so as to model the actual scenario. This noisy image is assumed to be obtained from the radar and the proposed algorithm is applied for filtering the noise from the image. After the application of proposed method i.e. DSF filter the image quality parameter is calculated in terms of MSE and PSNR. Then the result obtained is discussed in the subsequent section of the paper.

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Performance Evaluation of Speckle Noise Reduction in SAR Image using DSF Filter (IJSTE/ Volume 3 / Issue 07 / 006)

Fig. 2: Flow Chart

IV. RESULT The quantitative parameters which has been used to compare the image quality are the PSNR value and the MSE Value.

PSNRindB = 10 Log10 ( 2

2552 MSE

)

(8)

̃ (i,j)} ∑i ∑j{Y(i,j)−Y

MSE = (9) M×N Where PSNR stands Peak Signal to Noise Ratio, MSE stands for Mean Square Error, MxN is size of the image, Y represents the original image, y denotes the denoised image. A Higher PSNR indicates the reconstruction is of higher quality when the two images are identical. The results obtained on some of the images are as shown below.

Fig. 3: Speckle Reduction Using DSF Filter and Obtained PSNR=16.71

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Performance Evaluation of Speckle Noise Reduction in SAR Image using DSF Filter (IJSTE/ Volume 3 / Issue 07 / 006)

Fig. 4: Speckle Reduction Using DSF Filter and Obtained PSNR=18.99

Fig. 5: Speckle Reduction Using DSF Filter and Obtained PSNR=17.63

The table shown below compares the PSNR value obtained by Vikrant Bhateja et al.

S. No. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Images SAR_1 SAR_2 SAR_3 SAR_4 SAR_5 SAR_6 SAR_7 SAR_8

PSNR (Lee Filter) Vikrant Bhateja et al.

13.53 ---------------

PSNR (Proposed DSF Filter) (in db) 16.39 17.29 19.40 15.93 18.75 16.02 20.86 17.63

MSE (Proposed DSF Filter) 0.13 0.16 0.08 0.11 0.05 0.15 0.18 0.08

Size of Image (in Pixel) 149x149 427x460 150x116 81x145 135x135 137x108 150x115 137x150

Time Complexity (in Sec.) 3.94 43.7 3.49 2.55 3.60 3.03 3.47 3.92

The MSE value of the filtered image is also represented in the table with the image size. The time required to process the image is high here as the size of the SAR image is very big so here the time complexity has also been shown. According to the PSNR values obtained a graph is discussed below showing the PSNR of various images considered for the evaluation of the proposed algorithm. It can be observed from the graph that the maximum PSNR value obtained is 20.86 which is for SAR_7 image. Its size is also low and the time required is 3.4799. The time consumed for processing is good enough to process the input SAR image.

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Performance Evaluation of Speckle Noise Reduction in SAR Image using DSF Filter (IJSTE/ Volume 3 / Issue 07 / 006)

Fig. 6: PSNR Graph of the Obtained Result

V. CONCLUSION The proposed work develops a method for SAR image denoising. A primary requirement of such methods is that they should take into account the characteristics of SAR images which are different from optical images. Therefore it needs to adopt approaches specifically for SAR images to achieve the goal of SAR denoising. The problem of SAR speckle reduction has been related and studied simultaneously. Although traditionally this topic has been studied separately, the method has placed these two topics in a framework for development. In addition to its role in image denoising the proposed speckle smoothing method makes use of the so-called hierarchical correlation to identify edges from noise. The output value as can be seen in the table informs that the processing of the image provide higher PSNR value and low MSE value. Possible improvements concern mainly the selection of the different parameters involved in the filtering strategy. One issue regards the spatial extent of the window used for estimating the local time functions hence the paper utilized a finite spatial window with specified size for limiting the calculations.

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