Optimal parameter estimation in heterogeneous clutter for high resolution polarimetric SAR data

This paper presents a new estimation scheme for optimally deriving clutter parameters with high resolution POLSAR data. The heterogeneous clutter in POLSAR data was described by the Spherically Invariant Random Vectors model. Three parameters were introduced for the high resolution POLSAR data clutter: the span, the normalized texture and the speckle normalized covariance matrix. The asymptotic distribution of the novel span estimator is also investigated. The proposed method is tested with airborne POLSAR images provided by the ONERA RAMSES system.