A weighted nuclear norm (WNN)-based retinex DIP framework for restoring aerial and satellite images corrupted by gamma distributed speckle noise

Abstract

Restoration and enhancement are crucial preprocessing steps in the satellite domain. Mainly in active remote sensing such as Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), the images are more prone to speckle distortions and their reduction is not so trivial. Traditional deep learning models require large training datasets, limiting their applicability. This paper introduces a novel approach that combines the Deep Image Prior (DIP) model with a weighted nuclear norm (WNN) within a variational retinex framework to address these challenges. DIP leverages prior knowledge about noise distribution and works effectively with a single noisy image, eliminating the need for a large number of training images or ground truth. The WNN assigns non-negative weights to singular values, capturing the significance of each value and preserving crucial information during restoration. This approach offers a promising solution for satellite image restoration without relying on huge training data. The proposed method is evaluated through extensive experiments using various image quality metrics, including PSNR, SSIM, ENL, CNR, Entropy, and GCF. The comparative studies provide compelling evidence that the proposed method surpasses existing techniques in effectively restoring and enhancing speckled input images. Furthermore, statistical analysis performed using the Friedman test demonstrates the superior denoising performance of the model. Additionally, an ablation study is conducted to empirically determine the optimal regularization parameters, ensuring the optimal performance of the model. However, the theoretical selection of parameters for achieving optimal results remains an area that requires further exploration. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2023.