Purely Speckled Intensity Images Need for SAR Despeckling with SDS-SAR

Abstract: Speckle noise is generated along with the SAR imaging mechanism and degrades the quality of SAR images, leading to difficult interpretation. Hence, despeckling is an indispensable step in SAR pre-processing. Fortunately, supervised learning (SL) has proven to be a progressive method for SAR image despeckling. SL methods necessitate the availability of both original SAR images and their speckle-free counterparts during training, whilst speckle-free SAR images do not exist in the real world. Even though there are several substitutes for speckle-free images, the domain gap leads to poor performance and adaptability. Self-supervision provides an approach to training without clean reference. However, most self-supervised methods impose high demands on speckle modeling or specific data, limiting their practicality in real-world applications. To address these challenges, we propose a Self-supervised Despeckling Strategy for SAR images (SDS-SAR) that relies solely on speckled intensity data for training. Firstly, the theoretical feasibility of SAR image despeckling without speckle-free images is established. A self-supervised despeckling criteria suitable for all SAR images is proposed. Subsequently, a Random-Aware sub-SAMpler with Projection correLation Estimation (RA-SAMPLE) is put forth. Mutually independent training pairs can be derived from actual SAR intensity images. Furthermore, a multi-feature loss function is introduced, consisting of a despeckling term, a regularization term, and a perception term. The performance of speckle suppression and texture preservation is well-balanced. Experiments reveal that the proposed method performs on par with supervised approaches on synthetic data and outperforms them on actual data.