Use of statistical hypothesis test for mines detection in SAS imagery

Synthetic Aperture Sonar (SAS) imagery is currently used in order to detect underwater mines laying on or buried in the sea bed. But the low signal to noise ratio characterizing these images leads to a high number of false alarms. In this paper, a new method of detection based on a statistical hypothesis test is presented. The proposed method can be divided into two main steps. Firstly, a statistical model of the speckle noise is described. A statistical hypothesis test is then performed and an evaluation of the performances is proposed.