High dynamic range mapping for synthetic aperture radar images

Abstract

Luminance compression is often performed for high dynamic range images (still images and videos). A nonlinear tone mapping is applied for the compression in order to reproduce high dynamic range images using devices with a more limited (low) dynamic range. The images obtained after mapping may provide significant content differences in comparison to original data. This can be found for both optical and non-optical images. In this paper, we consider non-optical high dynamic range images, such as synthetic aperture radar images. Particularly, luminance compression may produce unwanted effects. Artificial objects found in an image and speckle noise may significantly affect the quality after tone mapping. In this paper, we consider several examples related to synthetic aperture radar images, as well as several global and a local luminance reduction method. The experimental analysis includes a comparison of several quality assessment methods.