Use of the second-kind statistics for VHR SAR image retrieval

The Method of Log Cumulants (MoLC) has been recently proposed for analysis and parameter estimation of the probability density function (pdf) defined in R⁺. Here the Fourier transform as the characteristics function is replaced with Mellin transform for parameter estimation. Instead of focusing on pdf parameter estimation using MoLC, our objective in this article is to directly use log-moments (also called second-kind moments in second-kind statistics) of transformed synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images as the feature descriptor describing the image content. Gabor filters have been considered to transform the SAR image data. Comparison is presented with first and higher-order statistics and spectral feature descriptors. K-nearest neighborhood (K-NN) classification algorithm have been used as classifier.