High-order total variation-based multiplicative noise removal with spatially adapted parameter selection

Multiplicative noise is one common type of noise in imaging science. For coherent image-acquisition systems, such as synthetic aperture radar, the observed images are often contaminated by multiplicative noise. Total variation (TV) regularization has been widely researched for multiplicative noise removal in the literature due to its edge-preserving feature. However, the TV-based solutions sometimes have an undesirable staircase artifact. In this paper, we propose a model to take advantage of the good nature of the TV norm and high-order TV norm to balance the edge and smoothness region. Besides, we adopt a spatially regularization parameter updating scheme. Numerical results illustrate the efficiency of our method in terms of the signal-to-noise ratio and structure similarity index. (C) 2013 Optical Society of America