Bayesian Hyperanalytic Denoising of SONAR Images

The SOund Navigation And Ranging (SONAR) images are perturbed by speckle noise. This paper presents a new denoising method in the wavelet domain, which tends to reduce the speckle, preserving the structural features and the textural information of the scene. Shift invariance associated with good directional selectivity is important for the use of a wavelet transform (WT) in denoising of SONAR images. In this paper, we propose the use of a variant of hyperanalytic WT, which is quasi-shift invariant and has good directional selectivity in association with a maximum a posteriori filter named bishrink. This filter makes a very good treatment of the contours. The corresponding denoising algorithm is simple and fast. Its performance was proved on images perturbed by synthesized speckle noise and on real SONAR images.