Speckle denoising using a variational multi-wavelet approach

This paper presents a new technique for speckle noise removal in underwater sonar images. It benefits both from the recent advances in wavelet-based and variational denoising. Whereas wavelet-based analysis tends to strongly depend on the selected wavelet basis, we propose to combine and fuse several monowavelet analysis within a variational framework. The associated energy function involves M-estimator in order to guarantee the robustness to outliers and to preserve image structures (edges, ridges, ...). An experimental evaluation for a Gaussian additive noise validates the proposed approach and an application to speckle removal in sonar sea-bed images highlights the interest of this approach for real images.