Regularized Least Square Approach for Remote Sensing Image Denoising using Wavelet Filters

Noise in remote sensing images (aerial and satellite) is caused due to various reasons such as atmospheric interference or lack of quality in sensors used to capture them. Removal of noise in an efficient way is a big challenge for researchers. In this paper, one dimensional signal denoising based on weighted regularized least square method is mapped to two dimensional image de noising. Objectives: This paper introduces a novel image denoising technique based on least square weighted regularization. Methods/Statistical Analysis: The proposed technique for image denoising based on Least Square (LS) approach is experimented on five different satellite and aerial images corrupted by gaussian noise with varying noise levels and regularization parameter lambda (λ) for different wavelet filter coefficients such as ‘haar’, ‘symlet’, ‘daubechies’ and coiflet. The effectiveness of the proposed method of image denoising is compared against the existing second order filter [based on LS] and conventional wavelet based image denoising technique based on the standard metric called Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR). Findings: From the experimental result analysis obtained it is inferred that the wavelet filters outperforms the second order filter and the conventional wavelet based image denoising. The complexity of the mathematics is low in our proposed method for image denoising. Applications/Improvements: The proposed denoising technique can be adopted as a faster pre-processing step in most of the image processing applications.