A TLRTV Dual-Band SAR Image Denoise–Fusion Strategy and its Preliminary Experimental Analysis in Multiband Airborne Radar System

Abstract

Multiband synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image fusion combines the scattering characteristics of targets from different bands to provide a comprehensive and informative output. However, the conventional SAR denoise and fusion separation framework often encounters the loss of fine details. This problem arises due to the inherent conflict between noise filtering and edge preservation. To address this issue, this article proposes the joint tensor-based low-rank total variation (TLRTV) dual-band SAR image denoise–fusion strategy. The proposed strategy formulates the denoise–fusion problem by integrating the LR and TV models. Furthermore, this problem is extended to a high-dimensional form using tensor representation. To effectively solve the TLRTV problem, an optimization method is developed based on the alternating direction method of multipliers. This method decomposes the TLRTV problem into a series of subproblems, allowing for an efficient and accurate solution. To evaluate the performance of the proposed TLRTV method, the real measurement dual-band SAR images obtained from our developed airborne multiband SAR system are utilized to compare with other existing denoise and fusion separation methods. The extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the TLRTV approach achieving better fusion results, particularly in the presence of noise interference.

Keywords

• Airborne radar
• denoise–fusion
• dual-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image
• low-rank (LR)
• tensor
• total variation (TV)