Speckle reduction via higher order total variation approach.

Multiplicative noise (also known as speckle) reduction is a prerequisite for many image-processing tasks in coherent imaging systems, such as the synthetic aperture radar. One approach extensively used in this area is based on total variation (TV) regularization, which can recover significantly sharp edges of an image, but suffers from the staircase-like artifacts. In order to overcome the undesirable deficiency, we propose two novel models for removing multiplicative noise based on total generalized variation (TGV) penalty. The TGV regularization has been mathematically proven to be able to eliminate the staircasing artifacts by being aware of higher order smoothness. Furthermore, an efficient algorithm is developed for solving the TGV-based optimization problems. Numerical experiments demonstrate that our proposed methods achieve state-of-the-art results, both visually and quantitatively. In particular, when the image has some higher order smoothness, our methods outperform the TV-based algorithms.