SAR image restoration via a NL approach based on the KS test

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image despeckling is still an open issue. Several approaches have been proposed in the last decades. The recently proposed Non Local approaches are often considered as the state of art of SAR despeckling. The difference between the NL algorithms presented in literature is mainly related to the adopted distance metric between patches and on the rule used for averaging the selected pixels. Within this manuscript a new metric for selecting similar patches is presented. The metric is based on the statistical distribution of the complex noisy image. The Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) test is adopted to compare the statistical distribution and to select similar patches. The approach has been tested and validate on real data, showing interesting performances