Deep Unrolling Network for SAR Image Despeckling

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images are inherently affected by speckle noise. Deep learning-based methods have shown good potential in image denoising task. Most deep learning methods for denoising focus on additive Gaussian noise removal. However, SAR images are usually contaminated by non-Gaussian multiplicative speckle noise. In this paper, we propose a novel deep unrolling network named SAR-DURNet to deal with the SAR image despeckling problem. We establish optimization problem of speckle noise removal by using the priori of noise distribution, which can be sovled by half-quadratic splitting (HQS) method with iterative steps. We unroll the iterative process into a trainable deep unrolling network(SAR-DURNet). The parameters of the SAR-DURNet are trained end-to-end with simulated SAR image dataset. Experimental results on simulated test data and real SAR data show that the proposed approach has superior results in terms of quantitative performance metrics and the preservation of intricate visual details, compared to several well-known SAR image despeckling methods.