Modeling Multilook Magnitude and Phase in Extremely Heterogeneous Clutter

This paper proposes a joint distribution of magnitude and phase for multilook SAR interferogram in extremely heterogeneous clutter. The presented theoretical distribution, called simply here J(2) distribution and derived from the multiplicative model and the known joint distribution of the homogeneous clutter, is shown to be able to model the extremely heterogeneous clutter areas. Moreover, we estimate distribution parameters by means of the well-known method-of-log-cumulants (MoLC). The experimental results applied on actual dual-channel SAR images prove the good performance of the proposed distribution.