AttentionDIP: attention-based deep image prior model to restore satellite and aerial images from gamma distributed speckle interference

Abstract

Image restoration is an inevitable pre-processing step in most satellite imaging applications. The satellite imaging modality such as Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is prone to speckle distortions due to constructive and destructive interference of the probing signals. Speckles being data correlated and multiplicative, their reduction is not so trivial. Since speckles are not purely noise interventions, a blind reduction process leads to spurious analysis at the later stages. Moreover, the image details are liable to get compromised during such a noise reduction process. An attention-based deep image prior (DIP) model with U-Net architecture has been proposed in this work to carefully address these setbacks. The attention block is used to scale the features extracted from the encoder, and they are concatenated with the features from the decoder to obtain both low- and high-level features. The attention module incorporated in the model helps to extract significant complex structures in SAR images. Further, the DIP model duly respects the noise distribution of speckles while performing the despeckling task. Various synthetic, natural, aerial, and satellite images are subjected to the testing and verification process, and the results obtained are in favor of the proposed model. The quantitative analysis carried out using various statistical metrics in this study also reveals the restoration ability of the proposed method in terms of both despeckling and structure preservation. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2023.