Nonstationary target detection method based on Rician distribution

A method based on Rician distribution is proposed in this article to detect nonstationary targets in urban area from Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image. Rician distribution is an adaptive model which could better fit the statistical characters of urban area SAR image than Wishart distribution, and then improve the detection results. The method has been proved to be effective by the experimental results based on E-SAR data. Particularly, the result in azimuth direction is highly appropriate to discriminate man-made targets and natural targets, which will be very meaningful in urban area studies.