A Statistical Analysis for Wavelength-Resolution SAR Image Stacks

This letter presents a clutter statistical analysis for stacks of wavelength-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. Each image stack consists of SAR images generated by the same sensor, using the same flight track illuminating the same scene but with a time separation between the illuminations. We test three candidate statistical distributions for time changes in the stack, namely, Rician, Rayleigh, and log-normal. The tests results reveal that the Rician distribution is a very good candidate for modeling stack of wavelength-resolution SAR images, where 98.59% of the tested samples passed the Anderson–Darling (AD) goodness-of-fit test. Also, it is observed that the presence of changes in the ground scene is related to the tested samples that have failed in the AD test for the Rician distribution hypothesis.