Sampling Kantorovich Operators for Speckle Noise Reduction and Gap Filling with Some Applications to Remote Sensing

Abstract In this paper, we investigate the application of multivariate sampling Kantorovich (SK) operators for image reconstruction, with a particular focus on gap filling and speckle noise reduction. To understand the accuracy performances of the proposed algorithms, we first derive a quantitative estimate in $$C(\mathbb {R}^n)$$ C ( R n ) for the error of approximation using the Euler–Maclaurin summation formula, under weak regularity conditions. We also establish a convergence result and a quantitative estimate with respect to the dissimilarity index measured by the continuous SSIM for functions in Lebesgue spaces. Additionally, we prove a multidimensional linear prediction result, which is used to design a new SK-based reconstruction algorithm to handle missing data, that we call LP-SK algorithm. To address speckle noise, we integrate SK operators into a newly proposed Down-Up scaling approach. Numerical tests are presented on synthetic and real SAR images to validate the proposed methods. Performance is assessed using similarity metrics such as SSIM and PSNR, along with speckle-specific indexes. Comparative analysis with state-of-the-art techniques highlights the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.