An iterative low-rank representation for SAR image despeckling

Speckle noises are inherent issues in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images, which hampers the analysis and interpretation of SAR images. In this paper, we propose an iterative low-rank representation algorithm for SAR image despeckling. The original SAR image is first transformed to the logarithmic image, which is then filtered iteratively by the proposed low-rank representation model. Specifically, in each iteration, similar patches measured by the Mahalanobis distance are collected into a group, and then filtered by the nuclear regularized low-rank representation. Finally, all of the filtered patches are aggregated to form the denoised image. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is able to yield state-of-the-art SAR image despeckling performance.