Statistical analysis and modeling of TerraSAR-X images for CFAR based target detection

TerraSAR-X is the first commercially operated high resolution space-borne SAR in the world, which shows good potential in target detection fields. Statistical analysis and modeling are key steps in SAR images based automatic target detection systems. With four typical statistical measures, lognormal distribution is proved well to fit the histograms of TerraSAR-X images over land and ocean regions, and more suitable than Weibull, Gamma, K, G0 and α stable distributions to modeling statistics of such images. Additionally, the MLE based parameters estimation and simply analytical expression of detection threshold also indicates the effectiveness and efficiency of lognormal based CFAR for target detection.