Despeckling SAR Images With Log-Yeo–Johnson Transformation and Conditional Diffusion Models

Abstract

Satellite images of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensors are contaminated by speckles from the coherent imaging mechanism. Although removing or mitigating speckle has been a critical issue for SAR applications, effective reduction continues to be a significant challenge for existing methods when preserving the intricate structures within SAR images. To address this issue, this work proposes a novel conditional diffusion model for SAR despeckling (DiffusionSAR). The new method explicitly learns data distributions by forward diffusion toward multiplicative gamma noise. The logarithmic and Yeo–Johnson (log-Yeo–Johnson) transformation are harnessed in preprocessing for fine-tuning or hybrid training. A prolonging steps technique is suggested in fine-tuning to match the preprocessing. A new synthetic dataset is designed for satellite SAR despeckling. The proposed method is compared with eight state-of-the-art methods using both synthetic and real-world SAR satellite images. The qualitative and quantitative evaluations confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method in structural preservation as well as noise reduction. A fine-tuning experiment using stacked multitemporal data shows the necessity of tine-tuning training in bridging the domain gap when trained with synthetic data and tested with real-world SAR data.