Remote Sensing Image Denoising via Low-Rank Tensor Approximation and Robust Noise Modeling

Abstract

Noise removal is a fundamental problem in remote sensing image processing. Most existing methods, however, have not yet attained sufficient robustness in practice, due to more or less neglecting the intrinsic structures of remote sensing images and/or underestimating the complexity of realistic noise. In this paper, we propose a new remote sensing image denoising method by integrating intrinsic image characterization and robust noise modeling. Specifically, we use low-Tucker-rank tensor approximation to capture the global multi-factor correlation within the underlying image, and adopt a non-identical and non-independent distributed mixture of Gaussians (non-i.i.d. MoG) assumption to encode the statistical configurations of the embedded noise. Then, we incorporate the proposed image and noise priors into a full Bayesian generative model and design an efficient variational Bayesian algorithm to infer all involved variables by closed-form equations. Moreover, adaptive strategies for the selection of hyperparameters are further developed to make our algorithm free from burdensome hyperparameter-tuning. Extensive experiments on both simulated and real multispectral/hyperspectral images demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over the compared state-of-the-art ones.

Keywords

• remote sensing image denoising
• low-rank tensor approximation
• noise modeling
• variational inference