Two steps multi-temporal Non-Local Means for SAR images

This paper presents a denoising approach for multi-temporal Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images based on Non-Local Means (NLM) method. To exploit redundancy existing in multi-temporal images, we develop a new strategy of NLM for multi-temporal data. Instead of directly overspreading the NLM operator from one image to temporal images, a two steps weighted average is proposed in this paper. The first step is a maximum likelihood estimate with binary weights on temporal pixels and the second step is iterative NL means on spatial pixels. Experiments in this paper illustrate that the proposed method can effectively exploit image redundancy and denoise multi-temporal images.