scholarly journals Quality Assessment of SAR-to-Optical Image Translation

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (21) ◽  
pp. 3472
Author(s):  
Jiexin Zhang ◽  
Jianjiang Zhou ◽  
Minglei Li ◽  
Huiyu Zhou ◽  
Tianzhu Yu

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images contain severe speckle noise and weak texture, which are unsuitable for visual interpretation. Many studies have been undertaken so far toward exploring the use of SAR-to-optical image translation to obtain near optical representations. However, how to evaluate the translation quality is a challenge. In this paper, we combine image quality assessment (IQA) with SAR-to-optical image translation to pursue a suitable evaluation approach. Firstly, several machine-learning baselines for SAR-to-optical image translation are established and evaluated. Then, extensive comparisons of perceptual IQA models are performed in terms of their use as objective functions for the optimization of image restoration. In order to study feature extraction of the images translated from SAR to optical modes, an application in scene classification is presented. Finally, the attributes of the translated image representations are evaluated using visual inspection and the proposed IQA methods.

Author(s):  
Prerna Singh ◽  
Ramakrishnan Mukundan ◽  
Rex De Ryke

Speckle noise reduction is an important area of research in the field of ultrasound image processing. Several algorithms for speckle noise characterization and analysis have been recently proposed in the area. Synthetic ultrasound images can play a key role in noise evaluation methods as they can be used to generate a variety of speckle noise models under different interpolation and sampling schemes, and can also provide valuable ground truth data for estimating the accuracy of the chosen methods. However, not much work has been done in the area of modelling synthetic ultrasound images, and in simulating speckle noise generation to get images that are as close as possible to real ultrasound images. An important aspect of simulated synthetic ultrasound images is the requirement for extensive quality assessment for ensuring that they have the texture characteristics and gray-tone features of real images. This paper presents texture feature analysis of synthetic ultrasound images using local binary patterns (LBP) and demonstrates the usefulness of a set of LBP features for image quality assessment. Experimental results presented in the paper clearly show how these features could provide an accurate quality metric that correlates very well with subjective evaluations performed by clinical experts.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (18) ◽  
pp. 3575
Author(s):  
Jie Guo ◽  
Chengyu He ◽  
Mingjin Zhang ◽  
Yunsong Li ◽  
Xinbo Gao ◽  
...  

With the ability for all-day, all-weather acquisition, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) remote sensing is an important technique in modern Earth observation. However, the interpretation of SAR images is a highly challenging task, even for well-trained experts, due to the imaging principle of SAR images and the high-frequency speckle noise. Some image-to-image translation methods are used to convert SAR images into optical images that are closer to what we perceive through our eyes. There exist two weaknesses in these methods: (1) these methods are not designed for an SAR-to-optical translation task, thereby losing sight of the complexity of SAR images and the speckle noise. (2) The same convolution filters in a standard convolution layer are utilized for the whole feature maps, which ignore the details of SAR images in each window and generate images with unsatisfactory quality. In this paper, we propose an edge-preserving convolutional generative adversarial network (EPCGAN) to enhance the structure and aesthetics of the output image by leveraging the edge information of the SAR image and implementing content-adaptive convolution. The proposed edge-preserving convolution (EPC) decomposes the content of the convolution input into texture components and content components and then generates a content-adaptive kernel to modify standard convolutional filter weights for the content components. Based on the EPC, the EPCGAN is presented for SAR-to-optical image translation. It uses a gradient branch to assist in the recovery of structural image information. Experiments on the SEN1-2 dataset demonstrated that the proposed method can outperform other SAR-to-optical methods by recovering more structures and yielding a superior evaluation index.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (17) ◽  
pp. 2067 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mario Fuentes Reyes ◽  
Stefan Auer ◽  
Nina Merkle ◽  
Corentin Henry ◽  
Michael Schmitt

Due to its all time capability, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) remote sensing plays an important role in Earth observation. The ability to interpret the data is limited, even for experts, as the human eye is not familiar to the impact of distance-dependent imaging, signal intensities detected in the radar spectrum as well as image characteristics related to speckle or steps of post-processing. This paper is concerned with machine learning for SAR-to-optical image-to-image translation in order to support the interpretation and analysis of original data. A conditional adversarial network is adopted and optimized in order to generate alternative SAR image representations based on the combination of SAR images (starting point) and optical images (reference) for training. Following this strategy, the focus is set on the value of empirical knowledge for initialization, the impact of results on follow-up applications, and the discussion of opportunities/drawbacks related to this application of deep learning. Case study results are shown for high resolution (SAR: TerraSAR-X, optical: ALOS PRISM) and low resolution (Sentinel-1 and -2) data. The properties of the alternative image representation are evaluated based on feedback from experts in SAR remote sensing and the impact on road extraction as an example for follow-up applications. The results provide the basis to explain fundamental limitations affecting the SAR-to-optical image translation idea but also indicate benefits from alternative SAR image representations.


2011 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 107-108
Author(s):  
Deepa Maria Thomas ◽  
◽  
S. John Livingston

2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (9) ◽  
pp. 323-1-323-8
Author(s):  
Litao Hu ◽  
Zhenhua Hu ◽  
Peter Bauer ◽  
Todd J. Harris ◽  
Jan P. Allebach

Image quality assessment has been a very active research area in the field of image processing, and there have been numerous methods proposed. However, most of the existing methods focus on digital images that only or mainly contain pictures or photos taken by digital cameras. Traditional approaches evaluate an input image as a whole and try to estimate a quality score for the image, in order to give viewers an idea of how “good” the image looks. In this paper, we mainly focus on the quality evaluation of contents of symbols like texts, bar-codes, QR-codes, lines, and hand-writings in target images. Estimating a quality score for this kind of information can be based on whether or not it is readable by a human, or recognizable by a decoder. Moreover, we mainly study the viewing quality of the scanned document of a printed image. For this purpose, we propose a novel image quality assessment algorithm that is able to determine the readability of a scanned document or regions in a scanned document. Experimental results on some testing images demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.


2020 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 10505-1-10505-16
Author(s):  
Yin Zhang ◽  
Xuehan Bai ◽  
Junhua Yan ◽  
Yongqi Xiao ◽  
C. R. Chatwin ◽  
...  

Abstract A new blind image quality assessment method called No-Reference Image Quality Assessment Based on Multi-Order Gradients Statistics is proposed, which is aimed at solving the problem that the existing no-reference image quality assessment methods cannot determine the type of image distortion and that the quality evaluation has poor robustness for different types of distortion. In this article, an 18-dimensional image feature vector is constructed from gradient magnitude features, relative gradient orientation features, and relative gradient magnitude features over two scales and three orders on the basis of the relationship between multi-order gradient statistics and the type and degree of image distortion. The feature matrix and distortion types of known distorted images are used to train an AdaBoost_BP neural network to determine the image distortion type; the feature matrix and subjective scores of known distorted images are used to train an AdaBoost_BP neural network to determine the image distortion degree. A series of comparative experiments were carried out using Laboratory of Image and Video Engineering (LIVE), LIVE Multiply Distorted Image Quality, Tampere Image, and Optics Remote Sensing Image databases. Experimental results show that the proposed method has high distortion type judgment accuracy and that the quality score shows good subjective consistency and robustness for all types of distortion. The performance of the proposed method is not constricted to a particular database, and the proposed method has high operational efficiency.


2013 ◽  
Vol 32 (12) ◽  
pp. 3369-3372 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ya-zhou YANG ◽  
Xiao-qing YING ◽  
Guang-quan CHENG ◽  
Dan TU

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