Modelling SAR with a Generalisation of the Rayleigh Distribution

Overview & Synopsis

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery has found important applications since its introduction, due to its clear advantage over optical satellite imagery, being operable in various weather conditions. However, due to the physics of radar imaging process, sar images contain unwanted artefacts in the form of a granular look which is called speckle. the assumptions of the classical SAR image generation model lead to the convention that the real and imaginary parts of the received wave follow a Gaussian law, which in turn means that the amplitude of the wave has a Rayleigh distribution- . However, some experimental data show impulsive characteristics which correspond to underlying heavy-tailed distributions, clearly non-rayleigh. some alternative distributions have been suggested such as weibull and log-normal distributions, however, in most of the cases these models are empirical, not derived with the consideration of underlying physical conditions and therefore are case specific. In this report, relaxing some of the assumptions leading to the classical rayleigh model and using the recent results in the literature on $\alpha$-stable distributions, we develop a generalised (heavy-tailed) version of the rayleigh model based on the assumption that the real and the imaginary parts of the received signal follows an isotropic $\alpha$-stable law which is suggested by a generalised form of the central limit theorem. we also derive novel methods for the estimation of the heavy-tailed rayleigh distribution parameter- s based on negative fractional-order statistics for model fitting. our experimental results show that the heavy-tailed rayleigh model can describe a wide range of data which could not be described by the classical rayleigh model.