Polarization Aware Deep Learning Framework for SAR Despeckling

Gianpaolo Passarello, Sergio Vitale, Hossein Aghababei, Giampaolo Ferraioli, Vito Pascazio

Speckle is an inherent characteristic of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery that complicates image interpretation and the extraction of reliable information. Although deep-learning-based despeckling methods have demonstrated promising performance, their applicability across different polarimetric configurations is often limited by the need for specialized architectures or separate training procedures. This paper presents a unified deep-learning framework for despeckling single-, dual-, and full-polarization SAR data using a single trained convolutional neural network. The proposed approach adopts a common nine-channel representation of the polarimetric covariance matrix and a polarization-aware masking strategy to accommodate different configurations without modifying the network architecture. Qualitative and quantitative comparison on three different scenes from different sensors demonstrate competitive performance across the considered experiments and support the feasibility of a unified, polarization-flexible approach to SAR despeckling across different polarimetric configurations.