Maximum likelihood estimation for compound-Gaussian clutter with inverse gamma texture

The inverse gamma distributed texture is important for modeling compound-Gaussian clutter (e.g. for sea reflections), due to the simplicity of estimating its parameters. We develop maximum-likelihood (ML) and method of fractional moments (MoFM) estimates to find the parameters of this distribution. We compute the Cramer-Rao bounds (CRBs) on the estimate variances and present numerical examples. We also show examples demonstrating the applicability of our methods to real lake-clutter data. Our results illustrate that, as expected, the ML estimates are asymptotically efficient, and also that the real lake-clutter data can be very well modeled by the inverse gamma distributed texture compound-Gaussian model.