Bivariate pearson distributions for remote sensing images

This paper studies the potential interest of the multivariate Pearson system for the statistical modeling of images acquired by different sensors. These images include optical and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) remote sensing images. The univariate Pearson system has shown good capacities to capture the statistical properties of SAR images. This paper introduces a generalization of this system to multidimensional vectors with a particular attention to the bivariate case. The method of moments is investigated to estimate the unknown parameters of bivariate Pearson distributions. The estimation performance is evaluated using synthetic and real data.