Statistical analysis of polarimetric SAR data using log-cumulants

摘要

Introducing knowledge of the statistical properties could improve the performance of PolSAR data applications such as speckle filtering, land-use analysis, ground cover classification. As the successful launch of the most advanced Polarimetric SAR (PolSAR) instruments including RadarSat-2, TerraSAR-X, ALOS-2, Sentinel-1, and GF3, we are faced with a vast volume of high resolution PolSAR data. To extract statistical information from the big SAR data accurately and efficiently, some simple but effective statistics are in need. It is reported that the log-cumulants are useful for PolSAR data analysis, and we can use them to design estimators for distribution parameters with low bias and variance. In this paper, log-cumulants of different statistical models are compared in a graphic manner to determine the most suitable model for different land types.