Synthetic Aperture Radar image nonlinear enhancement algorithm based on NSCT transform

Due to the imaging mechanism, Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images are susceptible to speckle noise, which affects radar image interpretation. So image denoising and enhancement are important topics of improving SAR image performance. A nonlinear image enhancement algorithm based on nonsubsampled contourlet transform (NSCT) is proposed in this paper. The image is decomposed into coefficients of different scales and directions through nonsubsampled contourlet transform. It is denoised by the threshold method of the multi-scale product of NSCT coefficients. Then thresholds of the nonlinear enhancement function are determined according to the coefficients of each scale. The two parameters of the function, among which one is used to control the range of enhancement and the other can determine the strength of enhancement, are obtained by solving nonlinear equations. The coefficients processed by the enhancement function are used to reconstruct the image. The simulation results on the Matlab platform show that the algorithm has a good effect of enhancing details of images and suppressing noise signals meanwhile.