Polarimetric SAR statistical analysis using alpha-stable distribution and its application in optimal despeckling

Abstract

In this article, the statistical model of the polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (SAR) single-look complex image is analysed using alpha-stable distribution. It is better to use alpha-stable distribution than Gaussian distribution to represent the statistical characteristics of the polarimetric SAR image. A polarimetric SAR covariance matrix estimation method based on fractional lower-order statistics (FLOS) is proposed. Based on this model, an adaptive polarimetric SAR optimal despeckling method based on FLOS is developed. This algorithm adaptively estimates the characteristic exponents of each channel and uses these estimated alphas to calculate the parameters for the optimal despeckling adaptively. The experiments using polarimetric SAR data demonstrate that the proposed method not only reduces the blurs that occur in the area of impulsive reflectors in the result of the original optimal despeckling method, but also maintains the speckle reduction ability (equivalent number of looks).

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their careful review and very useful suggestions, which greatly improved the presentation of this article. The author would also like to thank Dr Bryan Mercer at Intermap Technologies Corp. for providing the polarimetric SAR data.