DoPAMINE: Double-sided Masked CNN for Pixel Adaptive Multiplicative Noise Despeckling
This work addresses despeckling in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images, which is a domain-specific problem, and is incremental as it adapts an existing framework to a new noise type.
The authors tackled multiplicative noise despeckling by proposing DoPAMINE, a neural network algorithm that adapts a framework from additive noise denoising and uses a double-sided masked CNN architecture, achieving significantly better results than a state-of-the-art CNN-based method.
We propose DoPAMINE, a new neural network based multiplicative noise despeckling algorithm. Our algorithm is inspired by Neural AIDE (N-AIDE), which is a recently proposed neural adaptive image denoiser. While the original N-AIDE was designed for the additive noise case, we show that the same framework, i.e., adaptively learning a network for pixel-wise affine denoisers by minimizing an unbiased estimate of MSE, can be applied to the multiplicative noise case as well. Moreover, we derive a double-sided masked CNN architecture which can control the variance of the activation values in each layer and converge fast to high denoising performance during supervised training. In the experimental results, we show our DoPAMINE possesses high adaptivity via fine-tuning the network parameters based on the given noisy image and achieves significantly better despeckling results compared to SAR-DRN, a state-of-the-art CNN-based algorithm.