Two-Step Multitemporal Nonlocal Means for Synthetic Aperture Radar Images

This paper presents a denoising approach for multitemporal synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images based on the concept of nonlocal means (NLM). It exploits the information redundancy existing in multitemporal images by a two-step strategy. The first step realizes a nonlocal weighted estimation driven by the redundancy in time, whereas the second step makes use of the nonlocal estimation in space. Using patch similarity miss-registration estimation, we also adapted this approach to the case of unregistered SAR images. The experiments illustrate the efficiency of the proposed method to denoise multitemporal images while preserving new information.