Zhiyang Xu, Andrew Drozdov, Jay Yoon Lee, Tim O’Gorman, Subendhu Rongali, Dylan Finkbeiner, Shilpa Suresh, Mohit Iyyer, Andrew McCallum. Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2021.

Satellite image denoising is essential for enhancing the visual quality of images and for facilitating further image processing and analysis tasks. Designing of self-tunable 2-D finite-impulse response (FIR) filters attracted researchers to explore its usefulness in various domains. Furthermore, 2-D FIR Wiener filters which estimate the desired signal using its statistical parameters became a standard method employed for signal restoration applications. In this paper, we propose a 2-D FIR Wiener filter driven by the adaptive cuckoo search (ACS) algorithm for denoising multispectral satellite images contaminated with the Gaussian noise of different variance levels. The ACS algorithm is proposed to optimize the Wiener weights for obtaining the best possible estimate of the desired uncorrupted image. Quantitative and qualitative comparisons are conducted with 10 recent denoising algorithms prominently used in the remote-sensing domain to substantiate the performance and computational capability of the proposed ACSWF. The tested data set included satellite images procured from various sources, such as Satpalda Geospatial Services, Satellite Imaging Corporation, and National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The stability analysis and study of convergence characteristics are also performed, which revealed the possibility of extending the ACSWF for real-time applications as well.