IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING, VOL. 48, NO.
6, JUNE 2010 2723
Dual-Tree Complex Wavelet Transform Based SAR
Despeckling Using Interscale Dependence
J. Jennifer Ranjani and S. J. Thiruvengadam
Abstract—In this paper, a dual-tree complex wavelet transform
(DTCWT) based despeckling algorithm is proposed for synthetic
aperture radar (SAR) images, considering the significant depen-
dences of the wavelet coefficients across different scales. The
DTCWT has the advantage of improved directional selectivity,
approximate shift invariance, and perfect reconstruction over
the discrete wavelet transform. The wavelet coefficients in each
subband are modeled with a bivariate Cauchy probability density
function (PDF) which takes into account the statistical dependence
among the wavelet coefficients. Mellin transform of two dependent
random variables is utilized to estimate the dispersion parameter
of the bivariate Cauchy PDF from the noisy observations. This
method is faster and effective when compared to that of the earlier
techniques on numerical integration. Within this framework, we
propose a new method for despeckling SAR images employing a
maximum a posteriori estimator. Experimental results show that
the proposed method based on bivariate Cauchy prior achieves
better performance in terms of equivalent number of looks, peak
signal-to-noise ratio, and Pratt’s figure of merit.
Index Terms—Bivariate Cauchy probability density function
(PDF), Mellin transform, speckle removal, TerraSAR-X.
I. I NTRODUCTION
S YNTHETIC aperture radar (SAR) is a coherent imaging
technology, recording both the amplitude and the phase
of the backscattered radiation [1]. It provides all-time and all-
weather surveying. SAR systems use long-range propagation
characteristics of radar signals. The radar signals interact with
ground surfaces through reflection, scattering, refraction, or
absorption. The complex information processing capability of
SAR systems provides high-resolution imagery, high-contrast
observation, and accurate determination of topographical fea-
tures when captured from an airplane or a satellite.
Pixels in a SAR image represent the backscattered radiation
from an area in the imaged scene. Brighter areas are produced
by stronger radar response, and darker areas are from weaker
radar responses. The amount of backscattering depends greatly
on wavelength, orientation or polarization, incidence angle of
the radar wave, and nature of the surroundings. Each resolution
cell of the system contains many scatterers. The phases of the
Manuscript received February 28, 2009; revised September 21, 2009 and
November 21, 2009. Date of publication March 4, 2010; date of current version
May 19, 2010.
J. J. Ranjani is with the Department of Information Technology, Thiagarajar
College of Engineering, Madurai 625015, India (e-mail: jenni@tce.edu).
S. J. Thiruvengadam is with the Technology Information, Forecasting and
Assessment Council Centre of Relevance and Excellence (CORE) in Wireless
Technologies and the Department of Electronics and Communication Engi-
neering, Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai 625015, India (e-mail:
sjtece@tce.edu).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TGRS.2010.2041241
0196-2892/$26.00 © 2010 IEEE
return signals from these scatterers are randomly distributed
and cause interference. As a consequence, SAR images are in-
herently affected by a signal-dependent noise known as speckle.
It results in degraded visual appearance and severely dimin-
ishes the effectiveness of automated scene analysis. Hence,
speckle removal is a critical preprocessing step in tasks such
as segmentation, detection, and classification of SAR images.
The first step toward speckle noise reduction is to understand
its statistical properties. High-resolution SAR images of urban
scenes and some natural scenes exhibit impulsive behavior
which is indicative of underlying heavy-tailed distributions.
To accommodate such behavior, various models such as K-
distribution [2], lognormal distribution [3], [4], or correlated
speckle pattern [5] have been suggested.
SAR speckle reduction techniques can be broadly catego-
rized either as multilook integration techniques or adaptive
image restoration techniques. In adaptive image restoration
techniques, residual speckle is processed using the postim-
age formation filters adaptive to the local texture information.
Classical postimage formation techniques are Lee filter [6]
and gamma maximum a posteriori (MAP) [10]. Lee filter
approximates the multiplicative model by a linear combination
of the local mean and the observed pixel. The minimum mean
square error criterion is then applied to determine the weighting
constant of the observed pixel. Gamma MAP filter suppresses
speckle in the SAR images of forested areas, agricultural lands,
and oceans by modeling them using a gamma probability
density function (PDF). It uses the coefficient of variation and
contrast ratios in a selected window region for the smoothing
process and achieves speckle reduction with a minimum loss of
texture information. In both the Lee and gamma MAP filters,
speckle reduction and preservation of edge data are possible
only when the window covers a uniform area, without any
edges. These filters exhibit strong blurring effects when the
filter size is greater than 3 × 3. Adaptive image restoration
filters smooth speckle in homogeneous areas while preserving
texture and high-frequency information in the heterogeneous
areas [6]–[10]. However, this technique has degradation in
resolution.
Multilook integration techniques divide the azimuth spec-
trum bandwidth of the radar image into L segments/looks.
Each look corresponds to echo spectra of the same scene point
generated by an incident radar pulse. The independent images
formed by the L looks are averaged incoherently to reduce the
speckle noise, at the cost of increased computational load and
degraded image resolution if L is too large. Many SAR systems
integrate few looks during the image formation followed either
by a spatial-domain or a transform-domain filtering technique.
2724 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING, VOL. 48, NO. 6, JUNE 2010
An L-look SAR image, in intensity format, follows a gamma
distribution with unit mean and variance 1/L [11].
Single-space representations of SAR images either in the
time or the frequency domain are not sufficient while attempt-
ing to separate the desired image intensity from speckled SAR
data. In recent years, multiscale wavelet transform has been
used as a powerful tool for signal recovery in SAR images.
For instance, wavelet embedded anisotropic diffusion (WEAD)
[12] is a bistage filter for speckle reduction and is an extension
of the state-of-the-art speckle-reducing anisotropic diffusion
technique used for speckle reduction in ultrasound images [13].
In the first stage, partial-differential-equation-based anisotropic
diffusion is applied on the corrupted image. In the second
stage, wavelet-based Bayesian shrinkage is applied on the
nonlinearly diffused image. Wavelet thresholding techniques in
a homomorphic framework have been proven to provide better
reduction of speckle when compared to the adaptive image
restoration methods [3], [14]. Furthermore, effective signal
reconstruction is achieved by employing wavelet shrinkage
based on Bayesian formalism than by using the thresholding
techniques [15].
In homomorphic methods, a suitable PDF is used as a prior
model for describing the wavelet coefficients corresponding
to the log-transformed reflectance. In general, the distribution
of the wavelet image coefficients is non-Gaussian, symmetric,
and sharply peaked around zero with heavy tails [16]. The
wavelet coefficients of the complex backscattered signal of
a SAR image are assumed to follow a generalized Gaussian
(GG) PDF [17]. The GG PDF is a symmetric function and is
characterized by two parameters, namely, standard deviation
and shape factor. Parameter estimation is done based on the
method of log cumulants. In [18], the wavelet coefficients are
classified based on the degree of heterogeneity. Each class
of wavelet coefficients is processed with a MAP filter whose
parameters depend on the second- and fourth-order moments of
the wavelet coefficients of the original signal, corrupted signal,
and noise, in each classified region. The classification provides
better edge preservation capability, at the cost of increased
computational complexity. In [19], it has been shown that the
distribution of the wavelet coefficients of the log-transformed
reflectance can be accurately described by a symmetric alpha
stable PDF based on two main theoretical reasons. First, stable
random variables satisfy the stability property, which states that
linear combinations of jointly stable variables are indeed stable.
Second, stable processes arise as limiting processes of sums
of independent identically distributed random variables via the
generalized central limit theorem. Strong empirical evidence
suggests that many data sets in several physical and economic
systems exhibit heavy tail features. The heavy tail characteristic
justifies the use of symmetric alpha stable densities for model-
ing signals that are impulsive in nature. The results obtained in
[19] are superior to those of the standard denoising techniques.
Only two special cases of the alpha stable PDF have a closed-
form expression, namely, the Gaussian and the Cauchy PDF. As
mentioned earlier, the Gaussian PDF is obviously not suitable
to represent the wavelet coefficients. On the other hand, the
Cauchy PDF is unimodal and symmetric, having a sharp peak
around zero with heavy tails.
The Cauchy PDF is utilized as a prior for modeling the
coefficients of the log-transformed reflectance, and speckle
is suppressed by incorporating the spatial dependence of the
wavelet coefficients [20]. Then, the desired image intensities
are estimated by employing a spatially adaptive wavelet-based
Bayesian minimum mean absolute error estimator or a Bayesian
MAP (SA-WBMAP) estimator. However, in this algorithm,
the wavelet coefficients at different scales are assumed to be
independent for simplicity. However, the wavelet coefficients
of natural images have significant dependences due to the
following properties of the wavelet transform: 1) If a wavelet
coefficient is large/small, the adjacent coefficients are likely to
be large/small, and 2) large/small coefficients tend to propagate
across the scales [21]. In [22], a wavelet-based hidden Markov
tree (HMT) model that exploits both sign and magnitude corre-
lations in adjacent scales is proposed for denoising the signals.
In this paper, the bivariate Cauchy PDF [23] is used to model
the interscale dependence of the dual-tree complex wavelet
transform (DTCWT) coefficients. DTCWT has the advantage
of approximate shift invariance, good directional selectivity in
two dimensions, and perfect reconstruction over the traditional
discrete wavelet transform [24].
In [20], the dispersion parameter of the Cauchy PDF is
estimated from the noisy observation by a computationally
expensive Gauss–Hermite quadrature technique, where the ap-
proximate empirical characteristic function is evaluated only at
a limited number of points. In [23], the bivariate Cauchy PDF is
utilized in the complex domain for denoising images corrupted
by an additive white Gaussian noise. A maximum-likelihood
estimator is used to estimate the dispersion parameter in the
Cauchy PDF by applying a Monte Carlo integration technique.
Recently, Mellin transform has been proved to be a power-
ful tool for parameter estimation. This log-cumulants-based
method formulates the parameter estimation problem as a solu-
tion of a system of equations [25]–[27]. In this paper, a closed-
form expression to estimate the dispersion parameter of the
bivariate Cauchy PDF is obtained using Mellin transformation.
The organization of this paper is as follows. Section II
describes the statistical models for representing the wavelet
coefficients of the SAR image in intensity format, as well as that
of the noise. Section III proposes a novel method for estimating
the dispersion parameter of the bivariate Cauchy PDF. The
MAP estimate of the uncorrupted wavelet coefficients of the
SAR image is derived in Section IV. The experimental results
are discussed in Section V.
II. S TATISTICAL M ODELING OF I NTENSITY I MAGES
Let Y (k, l) and S(k, l) be the noisy SAR image in intensity
format and the noise-free SAR image that has to be recovered,
respectively. N (k, l) represents the corrupting multiplicative
speckle noise component. Assuming that the speckle is fully
developed, Y (k, l) can be expressed as
Y (k, l) = S(k, l)N (k, l) (1)
where N (k, l) is modeled as a gamma distribution with unit
mean and variance 1/L for a SAR image representing an
RANJANI AND THIRUVENGADAM: DTCWT-BASED SAR DESPECKLING 2725

average of L looks in intensity format. The resultant gamma In single-look images with very high noise level, the log-
PDF is written as transformed speckle noise deviates from the Gaussian distrib-
ution. However, as the number of looks increases, the Gaussian
LL N L−1 e−LN approximation is relatively close compared to all other models
pN (N ) = (2)
Γ(L) [11]. In this paper, as the multilook images are considered
∞ for speckle suppression, the log-transformed speckle noise is
where the gamma function Γ(L) = 0 tL−1 e−t dt. By a simple assumed to be additive white Gaussian with zero mean and
logarithmic transformation applied on (1), the multiplicative variance σn2 . Due to orthogonality, the mean and variance of
nature of the speckle is transformed to be an additive noise, the log-transformed speckle remain the same in the wavelet
and it is represented as domain. In [11], it has also been shown that logarithmic trans-
formation introduces undesired effects in the SAR images since
y(k, l) = s(k, l) + n(k, l) (3)
the mean of the log-transformed speckle is not zero. In order to
guarantee radiometric preservation, the biased mean should be
where y(k, l), s(k, l), and n(k, l) are the logarithms of
corrected, along with the exponential operation. The noise is
Y (k, l), S(k, l), and N (k, l), respectively. The mean and vari-
assumed to be independent and identically distributed. Then,
ance of the logarithmically transformed gamma distribution
the corresponding bivariate Gaussian PDF of noise vector nj =
are {ψ(0, L) − ln(L)} and ψ(1, L), respectively [11], where
(nj , nj+1 ) is given by [21]
ψ(i, L) is the ith polygamma function of L looks, and it is
 
given by 1 n2j + n2j+1
 i  i+1 p(nj ) = exp − , for 1 ≤ j ≤ J (8)
d d 2πσn2 2σn2
ψ(i, z) = ψ(z) = ln Γ(z). (4)
dz dz
where nj and nj+1 represent the DTCWT noise coefficients at
The DTCWT of a 2-D image y(k, l) results in an approxi- the jth and (j + 1)th levels, respectively.
mation subband and six directional selective subbands at each As proposed in [29], a robust estimate of the noise standard
level, which are strongly oriented at angles of ±15◦ , ±45◦ , deviation is obtained from the finest decomposition scale of
and ±75◦ [24]. The approximation subband contains the low- the noisy wavelet coefficients. The noise standard deviation is
frequency portions of the image and possesses most of the obtained as
information of the image. Thus, the denoising has to be done MAD (d(k, l))
d(k, l) ∈ subband + 75◦

only in the six directional subbands. Since the DTCWT is a σn = , (9)
0.6745
linear operation, after applying DTCWT on (3), we obtain
where MAD signifies the median absolute deviation operator.
◦ ◦ ◦ Furthermore, it is considered that the speckle standard deviation
dij (k, l) = xij (k, l) + nij (k, l), i = ±15 , ±45 , ±75
(5) remains the same for every scale j.

where dij (k, l), xij (k, l),

and nij (k, l)
denote the (k, l)th
DTCWT coefficient of the log-transformed observed intensity,
the original intensity, and the corresponding speckle noise
component, respectively, at level j with orientation i.
Based on our discussion in the previous section, the DTCWT
wavelet coefficients are modeled using a bivariate Cauchy PDF.
The Cauchy PDF of an N -dimensional vector x is given by [28]
γΓ ((1 + N )/2)
p(x) =
[π (|x|2 + γ 2 )](1+N )/2
We will drop the superscript i and the index (k, l) for simplic-
ity. Here, γ is the dispersion parameter. Let xj = (xj , xj+1 ) be
an interscale-dependence reflectance vector. xj represents the
DTCWT coefficient at the jth level, and xj+1 is the DTCWT
coefficient at the same position as xj , at the (j + 1)th level.
xj+1 is assumed to be the parent of xj . Hence, the joint PDF
III. E STIMATION OF D ISPERSION PARAMETER
The bivariate Cauchy PDF in (7) requires the accurate esti-
mation of the dispersion parameter γj for every scale j from
the noisy DTCWT coefficients. The dispersion parameters are
calculated using the central moments of the noisy observation
in (5), through Mellin transform. The rth moment of (5) is
written as
. (6)
mdj (r) = mxj (r) + mnj (r) , for 1 ≤ j ≤ J (10)
where mdj (r) , mxj (r) , and mnj (r) are the rth moments of
{dj }, {xj }, and {nj } at the jth level, respectively.
The first-order moment (mean) of {dj } can be estimated
empirically from N coefficients of {dj } as
1
N

p(xj ) is written as m̂dj (1) = [dj (i)] , for 1 ≤ j ≤ J. (11)

N i=1
γj
p(xj ) =   32 , for 1 ≤ j ≤ J (7)
2π x2j + x2j+1 + γj2
A. Estimation of mxj (1)
where γj is the dispersion parameter at scale j and J refers
to the decomposition level. A closed-form expression for the Let Mxj (s, t) be the Mellin transform of xj , which is mod-
estimation of γj is derived in Section III. eled using the Cauchy PDF p(xj ) with two dependent variables
2726 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING, VOL. 48, NO. 6, JUNE 2010

(xj , xj+1 ); it is defined as (19) becomes

∞
∞   −s  s  1  −t  
1 1 2 2
t
Mxj (s, t) = xs−1 t−1
j xj+1 p(xj ) dxj dxj+1 , Mnj (s, t) = Γ Γ .
8πσn2 2σn2 2 2
2σn 2
0 0 (21)
for 1 ≤ j ≤ J. (12) By substituting s = 2 and t = 2 into (21), the estimate of the
first-order moment of the noise is obtained as
Replacing p(xj ) with the bivariate Cauchy PDF in (7),
we get σn2
m̂nj (1) = , for 1 ≤ j ≤ J. (22)

∞
∞ 4π
γj
Mxj (s, t) = xs−1 t−1
j xj+1  2 3 dxj dxj+1 .
0 0
2π xj + x2j+1 + γj2 2
(13) C. Estimation of γ̂j
Substituting (17) and (22) into (10), together with the empir-
Using the following identity in [30]
ical moments in (11), we get

∞   μv  μ   
 
xμ−1 dx 1 p Γ v Γ n + 1 − μv
= n+1 γj2 Γ − 21 σ2
v
(p + qx )n+1 vp q Γ(n + 1) m̂dj (1) = 3 + n . (23)
0 8π Γ 2 4π
(14)
Rearranging (23), the estimate for the dispersion parameter
the solution to the integral expression in (13) is determined as
of the bivariate Cauchy PDF is derived as
     
1 Γ 2s Γ 2t Γ 3−s−t    
Mxj (s, t) =   2
γjs+t . (15) σn2 Γ 32
8πγj2 Γ 32 γ̂j = m̂dj (1) −   8π, for 1 ≤ j ≤ J.
4π Γ − 12
The estimate of the first-order moment of xj is obtained (24)
from (15) as

m̂xj (1) = Mxj (s, t)s=2,t=2 . (16) IV. MAP E STIMATOR

Substituting (15) into (16) The MAP is a natural and optimal choice when the PDFs
  of the signal and noise are known a priori. The observed
γj2 Γ − 21 noisy wavelet coefficients in the bivariate model are represented
m̂xj (1) =   , for 1 ≤ j ≤ J (17)
8π Γ 32 as the sum of the wavelet transformation of the signal and
noise
where Γ(x) is the gamma function.
dj = xj + nj , for 1 ≤ j ≤ J (25)
B. Estimation of mnj (1) where dj = (dj , dj+1 ), xj = (xj , xj+1 ), and nj = (nj , nj+1 ).
The noise in (5) is assumed to be independent, and the The standard MAP estimator for xj is given by
2-D Mellin transform of two independent random variables
x̂j = arg max p(xj |dj ), for 1 ≤ j ≤ J. (26)
(nj , nj+1 ) is given by xj

Mnj (s, t) = Mnj (s)Mnj+1 (t). (18) No integration is required to determine the MAP esti-
mate numerically; it is just sufficient to maximize p(dj |xj ) ·
The Mellin transform of the noise Mnj (s, t) with the p(xj )
Gaussian PDF in (8) is given by
  x̂j = arg max [p(dj |xj ) · p(xj )]

∞ xj
1 n2j
Mnj (s, t) = nj exp − 2 dnj
s−1
2πσn2 2σn = arg max [p(dj − xj ) · p(xj )] . (27)
0 xj

∞  
n2j+1 The MAP estimator in (27) can also be written as
× nt−1
j+1 exp − 2 dnj+1 . (19)
2σn x̂j = arg max [log (p(dj − xj )) + log (p(xj ))] . (28)
0 xj

Using the following identity [30] By substituting the signal and noise PDFs defined in (7) and

∞   (8), respectively, into (28), we get
1 −v v
xv−1 exp(−μxp ) = μ p Γ (20)
p p x̂j = arg max (J(xj , xj+1 )) (29)
0 xj
RANJANI AND THIRUVENGADAM: DTCWT-BASED SAR DESPECKLING 2727

where ⎡ ⎤
γj2 dj 1 ⎢ γj2+ 3σn2 ⎥
(dj − xj )2 + (dj+1 − xj+1 )2 qj = − + ∗ ⎣9dj − 2d3j ⎦
J(xj , xj+1 ) = − 1
d2
+ j+1 27 1
d2
+ j+1
2σn2⎛ ⎞ d2j d2j
⎡ ⎤
γj
+ log ⎝  3 ⎠ . γj2 dj+1 1 ⎢ γj2+ 3σn2 ⎥
2π x2j + x2j+1 + γj2 2
qj+1 = − d2
+ ∗ ⎣9dj+1 d2
− 2d3j+1 ⎦ .
1 + d2 j 27 1 + d2 j
j+1 j+1
The solution to (29) can be obtained by solving the following
equations [21]: Substituting (34) and (35) into (30), xj is determined as
dj
∂J(xj , xj+1 ) (dj − xj ) 3xj xj =  . (36)
= − 2  =0 (30) 3σn2
∂xj σn2 xj + x2j+1 + γj2 1+
( j j+1 +γj2 )
x2 +x2

∂J(xj , xj+1 ) (dj+1 − xj+1 ) 3xj+1

= − 2  The resulting shrinkage function can be obtained using [32],
∂xj+1 σn2 xj + x2j+1 + γj2 as follows:
⎛  ⎞
= 0. (31)  
 
⎜  d ⎟
⎜ 
x̂j = sign(dj ) max ⎝0,  
j
 ⎟
Rearranging (30) and (31), we get xj+1 = xj dj+1 /dj , and ⎠,
 1+ 3σn2

by substituting xj+1 into (30), it is rewritten as  (x2j +x2j+1 +γj2 ) 
⎡ ⎤
2 2
for 1 ≤ j ≤ J. (37)
⎢ γj + 3σn ⎥ γj2 dj
x3j − dj x2j +⎣ 2 ⎦ xj − d2j+1
= 0. (32)
d The despeckled image is obtained by performing an in-
1 + j+1
d2 1 + d2
j j verse DTCWT on the estimated wavelet coefficients in (37).
The biased mean is corrected by subtracting the mean value
Substituting xj = xj+1 dj /dj+1 into (31), it is written as {ψ(0, L) − ln(L)} of the log-transformed speckle from the
⎡ ⎤ image obtained after inverse DTCWT. Exponential transforma-
2 2
⎢ γj + 3σn ⎥ γj2 dj+1 tion is then performed to reverse the effect of the logarithmic
x3j+1 − dj+1 x2j+1 + ⎣ d 2 ⎦ xj+1 − d2
= 0. transformation.
1 + d2 j 1 + d2 j
j+1 j+1
(33)
V. E XPERIMENTAL R ESULTS
The solution of the cubic equations in (32) and (33) is
In this section, the performance of the proposed algorithm
determined as follows, using [31]:
based on the bivariate Cauchy PDF and MAP estimation,
   
  named as BCMAP, is analyzed using the images obtained from
 2 3  qj2 p3j
dj  qj3 q j p j  qj
3 the TerraSAR-X satellite and the Sandia Twin Otter aircraft
xj = + − + + + − − + [35]. Fig. 1(a) and (b) shows the original TerraSAR-X images
3 2 4 27 2 4 27
of a vegetation region and a typical road junction taken at 1-m
(34) resolution. Fig. 1(c) and (d) shows the 1-m-resolution SAR
  images of a horse track near Albuquerque, NM, and a pipeline

 2 p3j+1 over the Rio Grande River, NM, obtained from the Sandia
dj+1 
3 qj+1 qj+1
xj+1 = + − + + Twin Otter aircraft. Since the corresponding noise-free images
3 2 4 27
are not available, two uniform areas, namely, regions 1 and
  2, have been selected in each SAR image [see Fig. 1(a)–(d)]

 2 p3j+1 for the performance analysis. The selected regions compose
 qj+1
3 qj+1
+ − − + (35) of 49 × 56 and 32 × 69 pixels for Vegetation, 52 × 46
2 4 27
and 20 × 20 pixels for Road Junction, 35 × 40 and 31 ×
where 31 pixels for Horse Track, and 36 × 34 and 22 × 29 pixels for
Pipeline images. First, the equivalent-number-of-looks (ENL)
⎡ ⎤
performance of the BCMAP is analyzed. ENL is defined as the
2 2 2
⎢ γj + 3σn ⎥ dj ratio of the squared mean to the variance of the pixel intensities
pj = ⎣ d2
⎦ −
1 + j+1 3 in a homogeneous region of the image [5]. It is given by
d2j
⎡ ⎤ M ean2
EN L = . (38)
2 2
⎢ γj + 3σn ⎥ dj+1
2 V ariance
pj+1 =⎣ 2 ⎦ −
d
1 + d2 j 3 The ENL performance of the BCMAP is given in Table I
j+1 and is compared with that of the SA-WBMAP [20], HMT [22],
2728 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING, VOL. 48, NO. 6, JUNE 2010

Fig. 2. Denoised images by the HMT algorithm.

Fig. 1. Real SAR images. (a) Vegetation. (b) Road junction. (c) Horse track.
(d) Pipeline.

TABLE I Fig. 3. Denoised images by WEAD.

ENL VALUES FOR R EGIONS 1 AND 2 IN FIG. 1

Fig. 4. Denoised images using SA-WBMAP exploiting intrascale

dependence.

WEAD [12], Lee filter [6], and gamma MAP [10] methods.
In the homomorphic framework, an expectation-maximization
algorithm is devised to train the HMT model using the noisy
observation of the signal. Hence, the computational complexity
Fig. 5. Denoised images by the proposed algorithm based on the bivariate
of the HMT method is greater. The HMT method requires Cauchy PDF exploiting interscale dependence (BCMAP).
15 times more CPU time, when compared to BCMAP, to
process a 256 × 256 SAR image. The despeckled SAR images of HMT, WEAD, SA-WBMAP,
It is observed from Table I that the performance of BCMAP and BCMAP are shown in Figs. 2–5, respectively, for visual
outperforms all the aforementioned methods in terms of ENL. comparison.
RANJANI AND THIRUVENGADAM: DTCWT-BASED SAR DESPECKLING
Fig. 6. (a) Simulated “circle” image with L = 3. Denoised images using (b) HMT, (c) WEAD, (d) SA-WBMAP, and (e) BCMAP.
Fig. 7. Performance evaluation using PSNR with (a) two- and (b) three-level
wavelet decomposition.
The performance of BCMAP is also analyzed in terms of
peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and Pratt’s figure of merit
(FOM) using a simulated SAR image. The original pixel in-
tensities before being corrupted by speckle noise and also
the exact position of the edges are to be known in advance
to calculate PSNR and FOM. Thus, the efficiency of the de-
speckling algorithm can be quantitatively effectuated only on
simulated images. A synthetically speckled image is generated
by multiplying a noise-free image with speckle noise simulated
using (2). Fig. 6(a) shows the simulated speckled image with
L = 3, and Fig. 6(b)–(e) shows the images denoised by HMT,
2729
TABLE II
C OMPARISON OF PSNR VALUES FOR THE C IRCLE I MAGE
WEAD, SA-WBMAP, and BCMAP, respectively. The PSNR is
defined as
2552
P SN R = 10 log10 (39)
mse
where mse is the mean square error between the original
and the denoised image. The PSNR performance of BCMAP
for two- and three-level wavelet decomposition is shown in
Fig. 7. Table II shows the PSNR values (in decibels) for the
synthetically speckled image in Fig. 6(a) for three-level wavelet
decomposition. It can be observed that the proposed method
provides PSNR values that are larger than those of the other
methods.
Pratt’s FOM [33], which is used to measure edge preserva-
tion in the despeckled SAR image, is defined as
100
NDE
1
P = (40)
max{NDE , NID } i=1 1 + βd2i
where NID is the number of ideal edge pixels. NDE is the
number of detected pixels, and di is the distance between the
ith detected edge pixel and the closest true edge pixel. β is
a calibration constant. We set the arbitrary penalty parameter
β = 2 for a stronger penalization of misplaced edge pixels.
The factor max{NDE , NID } penalizes the number of false
edges. The smearing and offset effects are also included in
the Pratt’s measure to provide an impression of overall quality.
Conventional first- and second-order derivative edge detectors
[33] detect more false edges in areas of high reflectivity, ow-
ing to the multiplicative nature of the speckle. The ratio-of-
exponential-weighted-averages (ROEWA) edge detector [34]
has the advantage of high computational efficiency and good
edge localization. Thereby, edge detection is done on the
2730 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING, VOL. 48, NO. 6, JUNE 2010
Fig. 8. Performance analysis based on Pratt’s FOM with (a) two- and
(b) three-level wavelet decomposition.
speckle-reduced image using an ROEWA-based algorithm that
automatically discriminates the object boundaries and the false
edges. In ROEWA, Otsu’s nonparametric and unsupervised
principle for automatic threshold selection is introduced in the
discrimination process. An optimal threshold is selected by
maximizing the separability of the classes in gray level. The
FOM performance of BCMAP for two- and three-level wavelet
decomposition is shown in Fig. 8. Table III illustrates that,
among all the methods, BCMAP provides higher FOM values,
thus demonstrating better edge preservation capability. As the
number of looks increases (i.e., when L ≥ 2), it is inferred that
BCMAP consistently outperforms the other methods both in
terms of PSNR and FOM.
VI. C ONCLUSION
In this paper, a novel speckle reduction algorithm has been
proposed for despeckling SAR images that accounts for the
interscale dependences of dual-tree complex wavelet subbands.
A bivariate Cauchy PDF is employed to model the interscale
dependence of the wavelet coefficients in each subband. A
closed-form expression for the dispersion parameter of the
bivariate Cauchy prior with a zero-valued location parameter
TABLE III
C OMPARISON OF FOM VALUES FOR THE C IRCLE I MAGE
is obtained by utilizing the 2-D Mellin transform. The ENL
performance of the proposed algorithm is analyzed using real
SAR images. The proposed method outperforms the existing
methods, like SA-WBMAP, HMT, WEAD, Lee filter, and
gamma MAP, in suppressing the speckle noise in homogeneous
regions. Furthermore, experimental results using the simulated
speckled images show that, for three-level wavelet decompo-
sitions, the PSNR and FOM values of the proposed technique
are substantially higher than those of the existing algorithms
at less computational complexity. The proposed algorithm thus
achieves better denoising performance and edge preservation
capability. It is expected that the results can be further improved
if the dependences between a coefficient and its other neighbors
are exploited.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers
and the editor for the constructive comments that have helped
us greatly in improving the quality of this paper.
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J. Jennifer Ranjani received the B.E. degree in
electronics and communication engineering from the
Noorul Islam College of Engineering, Nagercoil,
India, in 2002 and the M.Tech. degree in computer
and information technology from Manonmaniam
Sundaranar University, Tirunelveli, India, in 2005.
From July 2005 to November 2009, she was
a Lecturer and currently an Assistant Professor
with the Department of Information Technology,
Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai, India.
Her research interests include synthetic aperture
radar image processing and multiresolution signal analysis.
S. J. Thiruvengadam received the B.E. degree in
electronics and communication engineering from
the Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai,
India, in 1991, the M.E. degree in applied electronics
from Anna University, Chennai, India, in 1994, and
the Ph.D. degree from Madurai Kamaraj University,
Madurai, in 2005.
From January to December 2008, he was a Visit-
ing Associate Professor with the Department of Elec-
trical Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford,
CA, under a Postdoctoral Fellowship, by the Depart-
ment of Science and Technology, Government of India. He is currently an
Associate Professor with the Department of Electronics and Communication
Engineering, Thiagarajar College of Engineering. His areas of research interest
include statistical signal processing and multiple-input–multiple-output wire-
less communications.