Parameter Estimation for the Single-Look G^0 Distribution

Abstract

The statistical properties of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image texture reveals useful target characteristics. It is well-known that these images are affected by speckle, and prone to contamination as double bounce and corner reflectors. The G^0 distribution is flexible enough to model different degrees of texture in speckled data. It is indexed by three parameters: , related to the texture, , a scale parameter, and L, the number of looks which is related to the signal-to-noise ratio. Quality estimation of is essential due to its immediate interpretability. In this article, we compare the behavior of a number of parameter estimation techniques in the noisiest case, namely single look data. We evaluate them using Monte Carlo methods for non-contaminated and contaminated data, considering convergence rate, bias, mean squared error (MSE) and computational cost. The results are verified with simulated and actual SAR images.

Tasks

Reproductions