Statistical properties of polarization image and despeckling method by multiresolution block-matching 3D filter

The theoretical and experimental investigations on the polarization imagery system of speckle statistical characteristics and speckle removing method are researched. A method to obtain two images encoded by polarization degree with a single measurement process is proposed. A theoretical model for polarization imagery system on Müller matrix is proposed. According to modern charge coupled device (CCD) imaging characteristics, speckles are divided into two kinds, namely small speckle and big speckle. Based on this model, a speckle reduction algorithm based on a dual-tree complex wavelet transform (DTCWT) and blockmatching 3D filter (BM3D) is proposed (DTBM3D). Original laser image data transformed by logarithmic compression is decomposed by DTCWT into approximation and detail subbands. Bilateral filtering is applied to the approximation subbands, and a suited BM3D filter is applied to the detail subbands. The despeckling results show that contrast improvement index and edge preserve index outperform those of traditional methods. The researches have important reference value in research of speckle noise level and removing speckle noise.