Analyse de la réduction du chatoiement sur les images radar polarimétrique à l'aide des réseaux neuronaux à convolutions

Due to the coherent nature of the Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) signal, polarimetric SAR(POLSAR) images are affected by speckle noise.  The effect of speckle can be so severe as to render the POLSAR data unusable. This is especially true for single-look data that suffer from very intense speckle. Noise filtering is necessary to improve the estimation of polarimetric parameters that can be computed from this type of data. This is an important step in the processing and analysis of POLSAR images.  Recently, a new approach has emerged in data processing aimed at solving a multi-tude of problems including filtering, image restoration, speech recognition, classification orimage segmentation.  This approach is deep learning and convolutional neural networks(CONVNET). Recent works show that CONVNET are a promising alternative for filtering SAR images. Indeed, by their ability to learn an optimal filtering model only from the data, they tend to outperform classical approaches to filtering on SAR images.  The objective of this study is to analyze and evaluate the effectiveness of CONVNET filtering on simulated POLSAR data and on RADARSAT-2, ALOS/PalSAR and GaoFen-3 satellite images acquired over the San Francisco urban area (California). Models inspired by the architecture of a CONVNET used in particular in super-resolution have been adapted for the filtering of the polarimetric coherency matrix.  The effect of different structural parameters of theCONVNET architecture on filtering were analyzed, among which are the depth of the neural network (the number of stacked layers), the width of the neural network (the number of filters per convoluted layer) and the size of the filters of the first convolution layer.  The models were learned by backpropagation of the error gradient using 3 datasets that simulate single-look polarimetry of the scatterers according to Cloude-Pottier classes. The first dataset contains only homogeneous areas. The last two datasets consist of patchwork simulations where local intensity is simulated by texture images and point target are added to the patchwork in the case of the last dataset. The performance of the different filters by CONVNET was measured by indicators including relative error on the estimation of polarimetric signatures and decomposition parameters as well as distortion measurements on the recovery of major details and on the conservation of point targets.The results show that CONVNET filtering of polarimetric data is either equivalent or significantly superior to conventional polarimetric filters. The results of the deepest models obtain the best performance for all indicators over the simulated homogeneous dataset. Inthe case of patchwork dataset, the results for detail restoration are clearly favourable to the deepest CONVNET filtering.  The application of CONVNET filtering on RADARSAT-2,  ALOS/PalSAR andGaoFen-3 satellite images shows results comparable or superior to conventional filters. The best results were obtained by the 5 hidden layers model (not counting the input and outputlayers), with 8 filters 3×3 per convolutional layer, except for the input layer where the filtersize was 9×9. On the other hand, the training data must be well adjusted to the statistical range of the real polarimetric images to obtain good results. This is especially true when modeling point targets that appear to be more difficult to restore.

Keyphrases: San Francisco, Deeplearning, Convolution neural network, Polarimetry, Synthetic aperture RADAR, Filtering, Polarimetric estimation