Parameter estimation of K model of radar cross section for synthetic aperture radar images based on second-kind statistics

The K distribution is used to model the radar cross section (RCS) of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images, and its parameters are estimated from the observed images using second-kind statistics. The types of intensity and amplitude images are considered in this paper. For each kind of image, the first two log-cumulants of speckle and RCS are derived respectively, and thus the estimators are derived with explicit expressions based on the second-kind statistics. Parameter estimation experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed estimators.