Unsupervised Denoising for Satellite Imagery Using Wavelet Directional CycleGAN

Multispectral satellite imaging sensors acquire various spectral band images and have a unique spectroscopic property in each band. Unfortunately, image artifacts from imaging sensor noise often affect the quality of scenes and have a negative impact on applications for satellite imagery. Recently, deep learning approaches have been extensively explored to remove noise in satellite imagery. Most deep learning denoising methods, however, follow a supervised learning scheme, which requires matched noisy image and clean image pairs that are difficult to collect in real situations. In this article, we propose a novel unsupervised multispectral denoising method for satellite imagery using a wavelet directional cycle-consistent adversarial network (WavCycleGAN). The proposed method is based on an unsupervised learning scheme using adversarial loss and cycle-consistency loss to overcome the lack of paired data. Moreover, in contrast to the standard image-domain cycleGAN, we introduce a wavelet directional learning scheme for effective denoising without sacrificing high-frequency components such as edges and detailed information. Experimental results for the removal of vertical stripes and wave noise in satellite imaging sensors demonstrate that the proposed method effectively removes noise and preserves important high-frequency features of satellite images.