Comparison of distributions for real and synthetic aperture sea-clutter

Modeling sea clutter is a difficult problem due to interaction of the sea surface characteristics (wind speed, wind direction), the geometry of acquisition (grazing angle, azimuth angle) and radar parameters (frequency, polarisation and resolution). In synthetic aperture radar imagery, the effect of coherent averaging and motion from the sea will also influence the statistics. The goal of this paper is to examine the effect of image formation on the radar backscatter of the X-band Ingara medium grazing angle data set. A number of recently developed distributions are considered for modelling the amplitude statistics including the K+Rayleigh and Pareto+noise, both of which account for thermal noise.