Heavy-Tailed Rayleigh Distribution: A New Tool for the Modeling of SAR Amplitude Images

In order to model the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) amplitude images as the heavy-tailed Rayleigh distribution, we focus our attention on two questions in this paper. First, based on the negative-order moments, we propose the logarithmic moment estimator and the iterative logarithmic moment estimator to accurately estimate the parameters of the heavy-tailed Rayleigh distribution. Second, we use the asymptotic series to evaluate the density function of heavytailed Rayleigh distribution, and propose an efficient threestep method suitable for real-time calculation based on interpolating polynomial fit. SAR image modeling experiments demonstrate that the heavy-tailed Rayleigh distribution reflects the high peak and heavy tail of SAR amplitude images, so it is an accurate tool for the modeling of SAR amplitude images.